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A review by meeners
Marxism and Literature by Raymond Williams
5.0
brilliantly illuminating - would recommend to anyone. at the heart of williams' argument is a stress on language as activity (active practice rather than static, separated fact). this may seem self-evident but williams shows how muddled it can all get once you move out into the territory of "literature" and a certain tendency to separate the forms from the social process. the real contribution of a marxist theory of literature would be to prove that they can never be separated from each other: form is "inevitably a relationship," embedded in and constitutive of processes that are at once social, historical, and material.
It is the special function of theory, in exploring and defining the nature and the variation of practice, to develop a general consciousness within what is repeatedly experienced as a special and often relatively isolated consciousness. For creativity and social self-creation are both known and unknown events, and it is still from grasping the known that the unknown – the next step, the next work – is conceived.
It is the special function of theory, in exploring and defining the nature and the variation of practice, to develop a general consciousness within what is repeatedly experienced as a special and often relatively isolated consciousness. For creativity and social self-creation are both known and unknown events, and it is still from grasping the known that the unknown – the next step, the next work – is conceived.