Williams 1977

Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: UP, 1977. Print.

• base/superstructure: sum of relations of production --> superstructure, which is scaffolded on the base
  • superstructure: institutions
  • forms of consciousness which express class view
  • political and cultural practices: where awareness of economic conflict gets fought out
• 79: "according to the materialist conception of history the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life" - Engels
• why isn't book history more explicitly Marxist? In terms of intellectual genealogy and ideological politics it is but in explicit political terms it isn't
• determination: settling bounds, limits, exertion of pressures
  • not opposed to direct agency: "we make our history ourselves, but in the first place under very definitive assumptions and conditions" (Engels)
• 85: objectivities passage - fill in
• 87: society quote - good to relate to Gaskell N and S
• productive forces: any and all of the means of the production and reproduction of real life
  • qt on 93
• mediation vs reflection
  • mediation is in the object itself
• hegemony
  • state relations (classical) -- class relations (Marxism) - Gramsci: complex interlocking pol/soc/cultural forces based on distribution of power: dominance and subordination
  • beyond ideology: "not only the conscious system of ideas/beliefs, but the whole lived social process as practically organized by specific and dominant meanings/values"
  • hegemony is "the whole body of practices and expectations...on shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world" & ff. on 110
  • Gramsci's solution: an alternative hegemony
• "grasp[ing] the hegemonic in its active and formative but also transformative processes" - unpack?
  • where cultural processes, e.g., works of art, actually do authentically break with hegemony - but what does that look like?
• 128 qt
  • think through the arg of "Structures of Feeling"
• 136: "now capitalist economic activity and cultural production are inseperable" -- they weren't in the C19, scale shifted earlier...
• implications of 137-8 direct for print culture studies
  • sociology of culture -> add study of forms (what does that entail here?)
• qt about forms on 190: unpack?
• 191 rehabilitating New Criticism formalism and updating its project