Culture As A Way Of Life--Study On The Marxism Cultural Views Of Raymond Williams

Raymond Williams is an influential British scholar in Social science after the Second war. In the last decade, people give more and more attention on his theories, especially on the field of literature theory and cultural studies. In fact, Williams is not only influential on cultural studies and the left-wing movement, he also has accomplished a lot in other fields, such as communications, space theory, ecology, feminism, etc. This paper, which bases on culture as a way of life, researches Williams'Marxist cultural views and finds out its meaning and value on historical materialism, consists of five parts.The Introduction introduces Williams' life and academic thoughts, and clarifies briefly the fundamental position of cultural views in his theories. After these, the thesis clarifies that it's important to have an in-depth understanding of Williams cultural view, also its meaningful to digging out its value in historical materialism and his unique perspective in social history's researches.The first chapter narrates the cultural background support of Williams' cultural views. It includes two sections. Sectionâ… discusses the academic ideal and theoretic interests of the first generation of the New Left, as well as the tradition of English literature; Sectionâ…¡generalizes Williams's personal experience:his family, academic and political activities, etc, so as to find out in which conditions Williams created his theories.The second chapter is the key part of the full text. It analyses the logical structure of Williams's cultural view. Sectionâ… is the foundation, it considers that Williams's culture is a kind of material being. Sectionâ…¡figures the "structures of feeling" concept as the core concept. It connects the way of life to culture. The theme of Section III tells that Culture opens the possibility of socialism in the future.The third chapter expatiates the value and significance of Williams's culture thought to the development of historical materialism from two perspectives. Section I discusses the critique from Thompson, Hall, Williams, Eagleton and other theorists on the concept of cultural criticism and Williams's response respectively. Section II discusses Williams' contribution to the methodology:All his life, he has been trying to create a new culture, a common sense and universal mechanism using a unique perspective in social history research to unify the diverse, dispersed working class which in itself has different appeals. Here he faces a difficulty which is to harmonize the generality and specialty.The conclusion stresses again that basing on British cultural tradiction, Williams expressed and developed his unique perspective in Marxism. At the same time,it points out that the development of Marxism in China today should learn from this kind of British experience.