레이먼드 윌리엄스의 저항적 힘과 이질적 정신

The Oppositional Force and Alien Mind of Raymond Williams: On His Idea of Language and Literary Criticism

This study explores Raymond W illiams’s idea of language and literary criticism, focusing on the difference of his approach that epitomizes his role as “the marginal man of Cambridge English,” “alien mind,” and “oppositional” force. His life long-concern for culture and language can be considered as a genuine opposition to the dominant discourse about culture and language in the post-war years. First, reading Culture and Society (1958) and Keywords (1976), this paper discusses Williams’s “historical semantics,” which differs significantly from a mechanism of stabilizing variant meanings of a word in the chronological order of their dominant usage. Second, through Marxism and Literature (1977), it deals with Williams’s critique of Saussurean structural linguistics and his ambivalent relationship to abstract Marxism analysis. Third, it examines Williams’s analysis of modernism that is not simply antagonistic. In The Politics of Modernism (1989), he speaks of the “two faces of modernism”—once a voice of dissent and then a metropolitan orthodoxy with its own supportive critical industry—and forcefully condemns the result of modernism. Finally, this paper illustrates Williams’s argument against the literary formalism of Cambridge English mainly through The Country and the City (1973) that is Williams’s greatest “oppositional” text. Despite its real limitations, Williams’s work is viewed as one of the most important bodies of socialist literary-cultural criticism in a period of postmodernism. The greatness of his work, this paper argues, comes not only from its range, scope and seriousness but also from its negative force that showed how limited and problematic the prevailing idea of culture, language, literary criticism was. Williams had an intuitive ability to make his idea of language and literature against what he saw as the inhumanities of “writing”―of theory, abstraction, schematization, the techniques he often identified with structuralism and chilly modernist distance.