| This dissertation traces contradictions in Raymond Williams's critical reception through the themes of totality, aesthetic autonomy, realism, and representation, but also through the fate of the concept of culture in cultural studies, of which Williams is a principal source. Due to the theoretical paucity of the culture concept in cultural studies, some critics have called for a greater dialogue between cultural studies and other disciplines, sociology and anthropology, long concerned with culture. The success of this dialogue requires a re-assessment of Williams's formation in British cultural criticism and a critique of his critics' discourse about his cultural theory.;According to hermeneutics, reception theory, and reader-response theory, any reader of Williams participates in a community provided by Williams's critics. Such a reader inevitably assesses prior evaluations of Williams's contributions to the culture concept. In terms of part and whole relations in hermeneutics and in terms of the process of dialectical formation, a reader necessarily performs a paradoxical assessment of the discourse community while becoming a member of it. Thus the dissertation argues for a reading of Williams determined through three layers of interpretation: the discourses of cultural studies, of Williams's critics, and of Williams himself.;The dissertation aligns itself with those feminist and post-colonial critics who pose the necessity of conserving Williams's epistemology in a post-representational age, and concludes that too many critics ignore Williams's profound debts to Marxism as these are recorded in his commitment to realism, to historicism, and to the core of his dialectical treatment of culture captured in the thesis, "Culture is ordinary." This thesis not only emphasizes the "popular" as found everywhere today in cultural studies but signals the re-organization of the canons of high and low "literature." Culture is indeed a code word for totality, but in Williams's hands that totality is at once necessary, democratic, and humane. |
