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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 (misuse, development...)
    • also: problems of signification, relation between words and concept
• language does not simply reflect processes of society and history, but most of these processes occur within language
• New kinds of relationship, but also new ways of seeing existing relationships, appear in language in a variety of ways:
  • invention of new terms
  • adaption and alteration of existing terms
  • extension
  • transfer

"Yet the problem of meaning can never be wholly dissolved into context. It is true that no word ever finally stands on its own, since it is always an element in the social process of language"

• what Williams want to add is not resolution but "an extra edge of consciousness"
• this is an exploration of vocabulary of social and cultural discussion, which is inherited within precise historical and social conditions and which has to be made at once conscious and critical (active, shaping and re-shaping, vocabulary to use)

• "writing about a field of meanings" (how can they be depicted, ordered but connected, inside a linear book but in relation?)

References

Keywords Project Website
Edward Said
The long revolution - Raymond Williams