PRINTED FROM OXFORD REFERENCE (www.oxfordreference.com). The former term, typically connected to structuralist film, refers to Rainer’s debt to the reflexive strategies of filmmakers such as Hollis Frampton and Michael Snow. In reaction to Thompson’s criticism of the 1970s, Williams subscribed to the expression of hegemony, thus re-conceptualizing his idea of “structure of feeling” (Williams 1977). But although Williams himself frequently espoused democracy in something like this sense, and developed the “structure of feeling” as a means of realizing it, the history of the latter concept demonstrates that this “democratic” impulse was constrained by Williams's concern to extend the tradition of moral criticism of industrialism that he himself traced from the early nineteenth century, … "ALL I KNOW IS I HAD A COW AND PARLIAMENT TOOK IT AWAY FROM ME" - A COUNTRYMAN SPEAKING OF ENCLOSURE It was with a little trepidation that I began to read the Marxist critic Raymond Williams 35 year old book "The Country And The City". Raymond Williams coined the notion "structure of feeling" in the 1970s to facilitate a historical understanding of "affective elements of consciousness and relationships." The industrial novel, Williams goes on to say, is a genre in which: ...industrial work, and its characteristic places and communities, are not just a new background: a new “setting” for a story. It is also continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged by pressures not all its own’ (112). This, I think, is more difficult: having emphasised the importance of the specificity of human experience, Williams attempts to add a sense of social ‘structure’ to these experiences, putting him in danger of performing the very abstractions and reductions he tries to avoid by using the word ‘feeling’. Williams originally introduced the concept “structure of feeling” in Preface to Film, a 1954 book he coauthored with Michael Orrom.7 The impetus for elaborating the notion grew out of Williams’s con- cern with understanding the culture of a given period through the ex- amination of a literary tradition. The ‘open hills and sky’ might appear as a fairly stale Romantic metaphor, but what they allude to is the potential for change - in Williams’ words, ‘a consciousness of aspirations and possibilities.’ In this instance, therefore, structure of feeling takes on a very specific and acute political essence: lived experience in Welsh mining valleys has within it the capability to transcend the apparent sadness and subordination of an industrial region in an era of economic depression. Marxism and introductions) 1. Please let us know if you agree to functional, advertising and performance cookies. A Dictionary of Critical Theory », Subjects: In: Jim McGuigan Editor, 2014. It is a version of the past which is intended to connect with and ratify the present (115-16). Discussion of the country and the city. A. O'Connor Raymond Williams: Writing, Culture, Politics (1989). 10, No. 134 Marxism and Literature which _have been precipitated and are more evidently and more ... contemporary structure of feeling, meanwhile, in the new semantic figures of Dickens, of Emily Bronte, and others, (2001). : 133). N2 - This paper considers possible applications of Raymond Williams’ (1921-1988) concept of a ‘structure of feeling’ and his wider ideas on realism to the ‘expanded’ practice of … He was the son of working-class parents from a Welsh border village, an adult education tutor, a Cambridge professor, and, according to Terry Eagleton, was and wasn’t a… Following the General Strike, Welsh industrial life, as it is lived and experienced by the Welsh, takes an increasingly embittered and militant form. In later works, particularly The Long Revolution (1961), Williams would develop this concept further, using it to problematize (though not refute) Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony. 128-135 Williams adopted the concept of “structures of feeling” for two main reasons. What concerned Williams was the social acceptability of particular conventions—think of the theme of mistaken identity which is rife in Shakespeare's plays which without the benefit of special effects relies on convention for its plausibility. Tine. Literature 4. Alex P. Keaton is a fictional character on the United States television sitcom Family Ties, which aired on NBC for seven seasons, from 1982 to 1989. Williams, Raymond. The ‘structure of feeling’ relates to a set of experiences as lived by a community in the present, but which through cultural articulation are mediated, diminished or lost entirely. 1. ...within a particular hegemony, and as one of its decisive processes, this selection is presented and usually successfully passed off as “the tradition”, “the significant past”. This is, according to Williams, “a myth functioning as a memory” that dissimulates class conflict, enmity… This is a series inspired by Raymond Williams’ idea of structure of feelings. Crucially, however, this process of selection and rejection also leaves the hegemony vulnerable, ‘since it has in practice to discard whole areas of significance, or reinterpret or dilute them, or convert them into forms which support or at least do not contradict the really important elements of the current hegemony’ (116). Its obvious that Williams, who was born in a Welsh border village, has a keen knowledge of the reality of countryside … The significance of a worked-out concept of structure of feeling is really revealed when considered in light of Williams’ understanding of hegemony. "Structure of Feeling and Selective Tradition (1961)." It is a pattern of “impulses, restraints, and tones.” To give a short definition to this term, structure of feeling refers to the struggle of hegemony during certain time periods. The link was not copied. To remain dominant, a hegemony must then have control over its margins, admitting through its own internal modification certain external elements, transforming others, and further extinguishing others. He was the son of working-class parents from a Welsh border village, an adult education tutor, a Cambridge professor, and, according to Terry Eagleton, was and wasn’t a… Raymond Williams is Professor of Drama at the University of Cambridge. Williams sees this rural environment, which exists in conjunction with the urban industrial environment, as an equally significant influence on Welsh lived experience. Following from Gramsci’s influential uses of the term, Williams adopts the concept as one which transcends the reductive and formal tendency of ‘ideology’ to define dominant and subordinated classes in simple terms of “haves” and “have-nots”. In the true industrial novel they are seen as formative...The working society - actual work, actual relations, an actual and visibly altered place - is in the industrial novel central...because in these working communities it is a trivial fantasy to suppose that these general and pressing conditions are for long or even at all separable from the immediate and the personal (221-222). Article in The Cambridge Quarterly, 2012. 2014. Put differently, the structures of feeling, of historically-specific sadness and struggle and of geographically-prompted aspirations and alternatives, are excluded from the very form of the account, which cannot conceptualise full human existence in industrial Wales. This paper reflects upon intellectual possibilities of Raymond Williams’ classic study The Country and the City (1975) within current urban and regional research. (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2021. Coronavirus (Covid-19): Latest updates and information. Keywords: Structure of Feeling, Raymond Williams, Cultural Theory, Expe-rience, Convention. Williams, in what is perhaps a slightly naive and Romantic vision, sees a quality of lived experience in Wales, in which the bleak drudgery of coal mines, steel works and dockyards is counterposed with the bright, expansive freedom that is directly visible in the sky, fields and hills which surround the industrial valley towns. McGuigan, Jim. 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