Key Words 9 (2011), Pp

Key Words A Journal of Cultural Materialism 9 (2011) edited by Catherine Clay Simon Dentith Kristin Ewins Ben Harker Angela Kershaw Dave Laing Stan Smith Vicki Whittaker Front matter.indd 1 14/09/2011 14:38 Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism Editors: Catherine Clay (Nottingham Trent University), Simon Dentith (University of Reading), Kristin Ewins (University of Salford), Ben Harker (University of Salford), Angela Kershaw (University of Birmingham), Dave Laing (University of Liverpool), Stan Smith (Nottingham Trent University), Vicki Whittaker. Guest editor for this issue: Daniel G. Williams (Swansea University). Editorial Advisory Board: John Brannigan (University College Dublin), Peter Brooker (University of Sussex), Terry Eagleton (National University of Ireland Galway and Lancaster University), John Higgins (University of Cape Town), Andreas Huyssen (Columbia University, New York), John Lucas (Nottingham Trent University and Loughborough University), Peter Marks (University of Sydney), Sean Matthews (University of Nottingham), Jim McGuigan (Loughborough University), Andrew Milner (Monash University), Meaghan Morris (Lingnan University), Morag Shiach (Queen Mary, University of London), Dai Smith (Swansea University), Nick Stevenson (University of Nottingham), John Storey (University of Sunderland), Will Straw (McGill University), Jenny Bourne Taylor (University of Sussex), Jeff Wallace (University of Glamorgan), Imelda Whelehan (De Montfort University). Contributions for prospective inclusion in Key Words should comply with the style notes printed on pp. 175–77 of this issue, and should be sent to Catherine Clay, School of Arts and Humanities, Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Campus, Nottingham NG11 8NS, ([email protected]). Books and other items for review should be sent to Professor J. Birkett, Treasurer, Raymond Williams Society, Department of French Studies, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK. Key Words is a publication of The Raymond Williams Society (website: www.raymondwilliams.co.uk). Contributions copyright © The Author Issue compilation and Key Words © The Raymond Williams Society 2011. All rights reserved. Cover design by Andrew Dawson. Printed by Russell Press, Nottingham. Distributed by Spokesman Books, Nottingham. ISSN: 1369-9725 ISBN: 978-0-9531503-5-9 Front matter.indd 2 14/09/2011 14:38 Contents Editors’ Preface 5 Signs, Socialism and Ethics: Eagleton on Language 8 TonyCrowley Terry Eagleton, Postmodernism and Ireland 25 EdwardLarrissy Williams and Wittgenstein: Language, Politics and Structure of Feeling 41 BenWare Border Country: Then and Now 58 SimonDentith Raymond Williams in Japan 75 A series of articles by contemporary Japanese critics, edited and introduced by Daniel G. Williams, with an afterword by Dai Smith Guest Editor’s Introduction: Travelling Williams 76 DanielG.Williams Soseki Natsume, Raymond Williams, and the Geography of ‘Culture’ 83 ShintaroKono Translation and Interpretation: Raymond Williams and the Uses of Action 100 TakashiOnuki ‘To Feel the Connections’: Collectivity and Dialectic in Raymond Williams’s Loyalties 112 YasuhiroKondo The ‘Far West’ after Industrialisation: Gwyn Thomas, Ishimure Michiko and Raymond Williams 124 YuzoYamada 00 Contents.indd 3 14/09/2011 14:58 Contents ‘A Narrative of Unsolved Cases’: A Reading of The Fight for Manod 134 YasuoKawabata Afterword: Found in Translation 144 DaiSmith *** Debate A Response to John Lucas and Sean Matthews 148 DaiSmith Reviews 153 Notes on Contributors 170 Raymond Williams Foundation 174 Style Notes for Contributors 175 4 00 Contents.indd 4 14/09/2011 14:58 Editors’ Preface The conductress, a West Indian, smiled as he jumped to the platform, and he said, ‘Good evening’, and was answered, with an easiness that had almost been lost. You don’t speak to people in London, he remembered; in fact, you don’t speak to people anywhere in England... Much in this issue of Key Words has to do with border crossings. When Matthew Price gets on a London bus in the opening page of Raymond Williams’s 1960 novel Border Country, he experiences the positive benefits of the crossing of borders by others: the immigrant bus conductress acts as an antidote to the refusal of interpersonal communication which Matthew finds characteristic of England in general and London in particular. This opening vignette figures a certain solidarity – an absence of barriers, perhaps – between those who have had to cross a border to get to England. Of course, in Matthew’s case, the border crossed is that between Wales and England, yet in the context of the essays presented in this volume it is perhaps worth noting that Border Country’s opening scene is an example of international border crossing. Five of the essays collected here are the result of the willingness of colleagues in Swansea and in Tokyo to cross international borders in order to engage in a transnational discussion of Williams’s work. The Editors would like to express their gratitude to Daniel G.Williams and Dai Smith for the opportunity to publish the results of what is clearly a very fruitful international collaboration, one which demonstrates the extent and scope of the ongoing and lively interest in Williams’s theory and fiction. Simon Dentith’s essay on Border Country complements these contributions by exploring the new contexts of reading and reception of Williams’s fiction which have emerged since the novel was first published over 50 years ago. Simon Dentith first presented this work as the Raymond Williams Society Annual Lecture on 21 November 2009, and we are pleased to make it available to readers who were not able to be present at that event. The remaining three contributions focus on questions of language. While this issue is primarily about Raymond Williams’s work, his ideas and influence, this section brings two other key thinkers into the dialogue – Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Terry Eagleton, who is perhaps Williams’s foremost disciple. Ben Ware’s discussion of Williams and Wittgenstein seeks to challenge certain ideological and disciplinary boundaries which have tended to keep these two thinkers apart. For Ware, Wittgenstein is not the conservative thinker some have made him out to be; Ware argues that ‘the desire to examine the real human circumstances in which meanings are formed’ is common to the thought of Wittgenstein and Williams. Both Ware and Tony Crowley engage Key Words 9 (2011), pp. 5–7 01_Editors Preface.indd 5 14/09/2011 12:20 Editors’ Preface with Wittgenstein’s affirmation that ‘philosophy can in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it’. Their aim in so doing is to refute the notion that Wittgenstein’s analysis of language precludes an appreciation of its transformative potential. Crowley explores Terry Eagleton’s work on language from the perspective of Eagleton’s positive engagement with both Wittgenstein and Marx, arguing that ‘Eagleton turned to the work of Wittgenstein as a way of returning signification to its basis in social activity’. Like Williams, Eagleton is acutely aware of the ways in which Wittgenstein grounds his discussion of language in the social. Edward Larrissy’s essay discusses Eagleton from the perspective of his generally negative engagement with postmodern theory, concluding that, while Eagleton sets himself against some of the worst excesses of postmodern theory, he is nonetheless ‘an author of seriously playful philosophical fictions who seeks to ensure that art is pondered and politically responsible’. Larrissy’s essay reminds us that sometimes it is a good idea to maintain borders and boundaries – those which separate postmodern and Marxist conceptions of meaning and of human identity, for example. But Larrissy’s piece also addresses cross-border issues, considering as it does Eagleton’s interest in Irish nationalism and nationality. In all three of these essays, the international scope of the intellectual exchanges described is once again striking – the discussions range over the work of writers such as Herbert Marcuse, Lucien Goldman, Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Mikhail Bakhtin and V.N. Vološinov, as well as Wittgenstein and Marx. The Japanese essays demonstrate the extent to which international intellectual exchange relies on translation: communication happens through language, and these essays have the great merit of showing that the process of interlingual transfer can itself generate new meanings and new readings. This volume also includes a ‘Debate’ section in which Dai Smith picks up the threads of a discussion about his biography Raymond Williams: A Warrior’s Tale (2008) which appeared in Key Words 6. The topic under debate is Raymond Williams the novelist. This is most appropriate in a volume which offers readings of Border Country, The Fight for Manod and Loyalties, as well as a comparative analysis of the fiction of Williams, Gwyn Thomas and the Japanese novelist Ishimure Michiko. It is to be hoped that these international perspectives and comparisons will contribute to an ongoing discussion of Williams ‘then and now’. This discussion will continue in 2012 in the pages of Key Words with a special issue on The Long Revolution, first published 50 years ago in 1961, and much debated in the course of the last half century. The dialogue also continues in conferences, such as the event sponsored by the Raymond Williams Society taking place at the University of Brighton in Hastings in 6 01_Editors Preface.indd 6 14/09/2011 12:20 Editors’ Preface September 2011 on the theme of ‘Raymond Williams and Robert Tressell in Hastings: Celebrating 50 Years of The Long Revolution and the Centenary of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’. It is also encouraging to note that a younger generation of scholars working in the cultural materialist tradition continues to engage productively with Williams’s work and his legacy. The 2010 Raymond Williams Society Postgraduate Essay Competition produced a range of excellent submissions and a winning entry from Simon Machin, a PhD student in the Department of English, Roehampton University, entitled ‘Why, comrade?: Raymond Williams, Orwell and Structure of Feeling in Boys’ Story Papers’.

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