Paradigm Shift: Raymond Williams's Literary Studies

Taking the Leaves-led Cambridge English Studies and the Western Marxist literary and cultural theories as comparisons, according to Kuhn's paradigm theory, the dissertation illustrates Raymond Williams's concepts, methods and theory-construction of his drama and novel studies, and selectively compares and analyzes his cultural and literary theories to expose the disciplinary differences between literary studies and cultural studies. It concludes that Williams's mode of literary studies has created a new paradigm, that is, culturalist paradigm, which helps the English Studies to pass a crisis.The culturalist paradigm shift of Williams's literary studies was primarily embodied in his drama studies. According to the chronological order of his publications, the dissertation classifies Williams's achievements of drama studies into three phases: innovating tradition, cultural turn and sociological turn. Drama in Performance (1954) puts forth the concept of"the unity of drama", advocating a notation system which can keep the unity of text and performance as a"total expression"or"total performance", therefore, it tries to innovate upon the traditional idea of drama. Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (titled as Drama from Ibsen to Eliot in 1954, changed to this title with revision in 1968) expounds the relationship between the dramatic form and structure of feeling. Taking the turn from naturalism to expressionism of the contemporary drama as an example, Williams testifies that the dramatic convention changes as the structure of feeling, and when the conventional methods have had a qualitative change, a new drama form surely emerges. Modern Tragedy (1966) establishes Williams's pluralist and dynamic tragic view. He says that tragedy is"a series of experience and conventions and institutions,"and it is a developmental and changeable continuum. Drama in a Dramatized Society (1974) contains two main points that"the drama is built into the rhythms of everyday life"and the life has been dramatized. From Drama from Ibsen to Brecht to Modern Tragedy to the viewpoint of"the drama is built into the rhythms of everyday life", Williams's drama studies turned to a culturalist paradigm:"a combination of historical context, theoretical method, political commitment and textual analysis."It is both an enlargement of objects of study and a shift of methodology. However,"the dramatization of life"demonstrates that the drama discourse has penetrated into cultural studies, to be more concretely, it can be said that it belongs to sociology as well.The dissertation analyzes three key words which dominate Williams's novel studies: the concept of the novel, the knowable community and a new realism, and it comparatively studies Williams's English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970) with Leavis's The Great Tradition (1948) and Eagleton's The English Novel (2005), which prove that his novel studies is also culturalist. Williams defines the novel from several relational perspectives: novel and social experience, novel and life, novel and history, etc. He explains that the novel will continue to break the"novel-death"view, because he argues that novel constructs the whole social experiences and creates life, and that art is a developmental process as the human history marches on. Under the...