User:Kim/reading/Keywords

A Vocabulary of Culture and Society
Raymond Williams (1976)

Foreword

"For Williams, however, these elements of high culture were simply part of a much more general mix in which any cultural production had to be understood in connection with both its own material conditions of existence and its relation to the wider cultures of the society.Thus literature could be understood only in terms of the educational system that produced readers and the technological advances that made a developed book market possible."

• Keywords should originally be published as footnotes, Appendix to 'Culture and Society'

Introduction

• "to (not) speak the same language"
• Williams came back from military - recognized "culture" shifted (meaning, usage...)
• To link words with other words "the words I linked it with" (class and art, industry and democracy)
  • "I could feel these five words as a kind of structure."
• this book as the record of an inquiry into a vocabulary: a shared body of words and meanings in our most general discussions, in English (what can a glossary be?)
• problems of vocabulary:
  • meanings of words develop (and are therefore harder to grasp)
  • explicit and implicit connections which made by people
• going beyond official, defining dictionaries (proper meaning) we find history and complexity of meaning
• (book) based on several areas of specialist knowledge but its purpose is to bring these, in the examples selected, into general availability. brings to attention:
  • problems of information
    • reading Oxford English Dictionary (OED), very aware of the time period it was made
  • problems of theory
    • proper meaning of word is commonly extracted from reference to its origins
    • but whats most interesting is not their original meaning but subsequent variation