Literature And "Cultural Revolution"-On Raymond Williams' Literary Criticism

Raymond Williams is one of the most important Marxist critics in the English-speaking world. In his heterogeneous writing of the mutual dialogue between the British tradition of "culture and society" and that of Marxism as well as its rewriting, Williams has always focused his writing on the political theme of Cultural Revolution. The scholars all over the world have focused their researches mainly on his cultural theory and lacked a deep and systematic study on his literary criticism. This dissertation, with his cultural theory as the background and with his Cultural Revolution as the clue, aims to give a systematic discussion about Williams' literary criticism.Williams focuses his academic research on the turbulent historical time between the post-Industrial Revolution and the first half of the 20th century. Culture and Society and The Long Revolution are the representative works about Williams' perspectives in his early stage, which have laid a good foundation for all his ideas in his life. In such books, Williams creates a cultural perspective which has dominated his whole academic career by carding the British tradition of Culture and Society and by criticizing the viewpoints of the elitism and conservatism in the tradition. As to the former, Williams' point view of culture is to eliminate opposition between the elite and the mass, between the high brow and the low brow, between the culture and the civilization. As to the latter, the final purpose of Williams' view on culture is to direct to an open Common Culture and a new community which faces the future instead of yearning for the past. Thus, Williams has created the dominant ideas in his life, that is, Common Culture and The Long Revolution whose core is Cultural Revolution.In the eyes of Williams, what the industrialization has brought is not arrival of the real new human Community but the disappearance of the old Organic Community. The formation of the new Community depends not only on the new economical and political systems but also on the new Cultural Community. Neither the triumph of the bourgeois revolution represented by the Industrial Revolution nor the success or failure of the proletarian revolution means the end of the modern transition of human society. Williams considers the unfinished process as the Long Revolution with its core of Cultural Revolution including economical and political revolution. In the course of the history of the Long Revolution, the Expansion of different cultural forms including literature is the important way to the realization of Cultural Revolution and the gradual formation of Common Culture. The major task of Williams lies in studying and sketching the map of the changes of different forms of cultures after the industrial revolution, in which he has involved literature directly or indirectly, individually or specially. Therefore, the formation of Williams' whole ideas cannot be basically separated from his literary criticism.Williams' literary criticism involves various kinds of literature, such as essays, poems, novels and dramas, among which dramas and novels included in tragic literature take the most important position. Within the framework of cultural change, Williams' theatrical criticism attempts to explore the structural changes of the Western dramas, particularly that of the British drama. The special feature of Williams' criticism of drama lies in the relating research with the western modern experience, especially the Revolution experience. In Williams' research, the history of modern drama change is the history of the exploration of drama forms. The prominent achievement of this exploration manifests in drama concepts and drama forms -Complex Seeing which is proposed by Brecht in a creative way. In the research of modern tragic literature which includes dramas and novels, Williams emphasizes the close relationship between tragedy and practical experience, of which Revolution is the most representative experience. Therefore, the modern tragic literature has become the most important cultural form in modern revolution. In literature criticism, Williams illustrates The Knowable Community tradition of British novels in terms of Great Tradition which is constructed by Leavis. Williams views The Knowable Community as the Community of the novels which he regards as ideal to examine and analyze the evolvement of British modern novel modality. Complex Seeing, the close relation between modern tragedy and revolution, and The Knowable Community-all this means that literature as a type of cultural practical form certainly contains The Structure of Feelings in its time.The unique feature is the space conception which is contained in Williams' literary criticism. The works such as The country and the City, which focuses on "country", "city" and "border", present concretely the essential theme of the works of The Culture and the Society and The Long Revolution in the literature field. In Williams' literature critics, "country", "city", and "border", between them are not one-dimensional space as in western traditional space theory but a composite connecting with time and human choices. Moreover, it is not purely a geographic space but a cultural space representing the conflicts and changes between the ways of human life. He profoundly analyzes the literary space and The Structure of Feelings contained in them, according to the research of which the three spaces of British modern literature changes in different times. Williams' spatial critics on British modern literature, therefore, is not a modern literature history written in terms of space but a revolution field which intends to analyze British modern literature. On such a base, Williams, who has accepted from Marxism the view on the removal of the differences between the city and the country, proposes clearly the suggestion of the ideal living space of the amalgamation between the city and the country and emphases that the new human Community is certainly the new Cultural Community which is the melting point of the city and the country.In Williams' early academic career, he focuses on the critics and researches of particular cultural and literary phenomena, which contains explicit theoretical concept. However, most of his criticism is detailed text analysis. The prefaces, introductions and conclusions of Williams' most works tend to be theoretical basis or sublimation which is the extension of his detailed criticism. In his late academic career, based on the examination of tradition of Marxism, Williams consciously involves himself in the theoretical construction, attempting to achieve the integrity of his theoretical concept manifested in his concrete cultural (or literary) criticism into the tradition of Marxism based on re-reading the proposition of Base and Superstructure of the tradition of Marxism and the concept of Ideology, Williams creatively proposes the theoretical system of Cultural Materialism. The theoretical core of Cultural Materialism is to reveal the material character of literature and culture and emphasize the close relationship between literature and other related human activities. It is, however, the rewriting of Williams' early idea that " Culture is Ordinary" in the tradition of Marxism. And the eventual aim is to give prominence to material power of culture and literature in the process of human history.In the rewriting, Williams not only actualizes the critique and doubt on traditional Theory of Reflection and Theory of Aestheticism but also constructs literary (or cultural) concept on the basis of Historical Semiotics with the strategy of "historicizing" the linguistic fashion. In the emergence of cultural and literary substance, based on Marxist ideas of totality and hegemony, Williams proposes the cultural hypothesis of a dynamic tertiary structure. In Williams' eyes, the dynamic process of culture is, diachronically or synchronically, the hegemony dispute among the three cultural forms of The Dominant Culture, The Residual Culture and The Emergent Culture. The "authentic historical analysis" of concrete cultural texts or forms is to clear The Structure of Feelings through textual forms, that is, to explore in these textual forms the simultaneously existing but heterogeneous and oppositional cultural element, especially the revolutionary element, so as to develop the formal analysis of texts into a cultural, social and historical analysis and thus endow a feature of the sociology of culture to literary study. Williams' criticism of culture and art as well as all his other writings are strategies as reality involvement employed by the Left intellectuals to reject and criticize capitalism in the context of new capitalism. The complex situation in which Williams is engaged in writing is comprised of many factors such as the historical tradition that Britain attaches importance to innovation and radical real life which is fraught with wars, revolution and various riots; Leavisite tradition and Marxist tradition; the horizon of "educated intelligence" who experienced Cambridge baptism and the affection of the "countryman" who came from the lower class in Welsh. Among these factors, the latter of each group always stimulates radical and political theme of writing, the former of each group, on the other hand, consistently slows down the radical position. Thus Williams' radical feeling of politics develops the unique theme of writing, dispersing in various writing forms of primary literary criticism. In this sense, Williams' literary criticism, like all his other writings, is the convergence of British national tradition, Marxist political theme, personal life experience and the practical environment of British capitalism. The personality charm, nationality characteristic, Marxist standpoint and practical feeling of the intellectuals which are shining in Williams' literary criticism, have significant implications for us.