Raymond Williams “Experience,” from Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society

Abstract

“Experience,” from Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society Raymond Williams (1921–88) was a Welsh scholar, novelist, and media/culture critic who, among his many accomplishments, is recognized as one of the earliest scholars of the field of Culture Studies. Williams pioneered the notion that culture is a fundamentally ordinary phenomenon: a series of complex, yet completely commonplace, ideological struggles that permeate the whole of society. In making this statement he intended both to rescue the term from its relegation to an elitist realm of arts and literature focused solely on aesthetics, and to simultaneously demonstrate how these very ordinary struggles are also at the center of such arts, literature, and aesthetics. Williams was born in Wales, the son of a railway worker. Trained at Cambridge, he interrupted his education, including his extracurricular involvement in the student-led branch of the Communist party, for military service in the British Army during World War II. After his return to Cambridge, he completed a degree in English and worked for several years in the field of adult education. In 1973 Williams was named Visiting Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, and after this held a post as Professor of Drama at Cambridge for close to a decade. In his professional life Williams is noteworthy for having been a professor of drama who was also a playwright and a media critic who, through his influential work in television, also participated in the creation of the medium.