ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

Few literary critics have so emphasized the at once constitutive and constituting role of culture in the formation of the human as Raymond Williams. Indeed, the concept that is perhaps most synonymous with Williams, “structures of feeling,” is an attempt to deal with precisely the centrality of human perception and action in reproducing social relations. Yet despite the fact that Williams’ work on the human was a formative influence on theorists such as Edward Said and Terry Eagleton, and was pivotal to the establishment of Cultural Studies, this contribution has been underrecognized and underappreciated. This seminar will attempt to redress this silence and explore the possibilities that Williams’ projects make realizable in our contemporary situation. Some of the themes which this panel will explore are:

• Nature, creation and the human
• The country and the city revisited
• Media and Williams
• Williams and the theory and politics of film
• Contemporary structures of feeling
• Memory, history and the human
• Williams and oppositional aesthetics
• Alternative country music
• Cultural materialism: then and now

Friday, March 24

Jan Gorak, University of Denver
“Trapped Between Culture and System: The Television Criticism of Raymond Williams”
Dana Polan, Tisch School of Arts, NYU
“Raymond Williams on Film: An Underdeveloped Legacy”
Pamela Fox, Georgetown University, and Barbara Ching, University of Memphis
“Revivals and Survivals: Raymond Williams Meets Alternative Country Music”

Saturday, March 25

Wesley Beal, University of Florida
“Globalizing the Knowable Community: Lost in Translation and Closer”
Keith O’Regan, York University
“Culture and Opposition: The Politics of Loss in Brecht and Williams”
Alex Codlin, University of Texas at Austin
“In the Borderlands: Gilbert & George’s Early Sculptures”
David Siar, Winston-Salem State University
“Raymond Williams on ‘Alignment and Commitment’”

Sunday, March 26

Hywel Dix, University of Glamorgan, U.K.
“Raymond Williams: Cultural Materialism and the Break-Up of Britain”
Andrew Milner, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
“Cultural materialism and democratic Socialism”
Ben Lee, New College of Florida
“Raymond Williams and the Poetics of Emergence”
Lyudmila Razumova, SUNY at Stony Brook
Spread of the Closed City: Paradoxes of Mobility in the Modern World”