CRITICAL QUARTERLY最新文献

At the end of World War II, a young officer from the British army was granted immediate demobilization to return to Cambridge in order to complete his degree, which had been interrupted by the war. He had enlisted in the army in 1941 at the age of 20 and had led a unit of four tanks as part of the Guards Armoured Division during the battle for Normandy. After successfully completing his undergraduate degree on his return to Cambridge, he took a job as a tutor with the Workers' Educational Association in the hope that it would also allow him time to write novels and literary criticism. Within 10 years, at the age of 35, he had finished his first major work of criticism. This was to become one of the most influential works of criticism in English of the latter half of the twentieth century, and along with other of his books was to play a decisive role in founding and shaping the academic field of Cultural Studies in the United Kingdom. The man was Raymond Williams, and the book was Culture and Society 1780–1950.

The manuscript as delivered in 1956 to the publisher Chatto and Windus by a then relatively unknown academic – a tutor in adult education – was considered too long, and an important appendix in which Williams discussed words which he considered significant in framing debates about culture and society was left out. Even so, his introduction to Culture and Society carries the subtitle: The Key Words – ‘Industry’, ‘Democracy’, ‘Class’, ‘Art’, ‘Culture’. Indeed, his encounter with the history of these words in the Oxford English Dictionary in the basement of the public library of Seaford more or less primed the book and became a cornerstone of his method of literary and cultural analysis. Some twenty years later, in 1976, these very words Industry, Democracy, Class, Art, and Culture, along with the excised appendix and further notes became the basis of a self-standing work, Keywords: A vocabulary of Culture and Society (revised and expanded in 1983), in which Williams provided two- or three-page accounts of 131words that he considered crucial to our understanding of culture and society, as well as the complicated relations between them. In this did both Culture and Society and Keywords not only inaugurate and help to shape the field of cultural studies, but they also prompted a particular and continuing thread of work in that field on the vocabulary of culture and society.

There have, indeed, been two substantial sequels within the tradition of enquiry that Williams inaugurated: New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society¹ and Keywords for Today: A 21st Century Vocabulary.² Both books draw their inspiration directly and openly from Williams's original Keywords and see their purpose as building on his initial definitions and purpose in the light of social and cultural change over the intervening decades. Of course, the

The opening scene in Saša Stanišić's latest work, Where You Come From, places the reader back in Višegrad, a storied town in today's Bosnia and Herzegovina and the site where his first semi-autobiographical novel, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, ended. We see the narrator's grandmother Kristina as an elderly lady, shouting from the balcony down to her younger self on the street: ‘I'll come get you. Don’t move!’¹ Living up to her promise, Kristina drags herself down three flights of stairs, without shoes, her feet covered by thin black stockings only. Cars hit the brakes. Traffic comes to an abrupt halt. In her effort to rescue her adolescent self, Kristina succeeds at stopping the steady flow of the world for a moment. The evocative opening places Kristina front and centre in the text while introducing a split in time: we are simultaneously in the years 2018 and 1943, as well as in some Yugoslav moment in-between, when the street on which the impossible encounter was to play out still bore the name of Josip Broz Tito.²

The formidable storyteller Stanišić tempts his audience in this vignette-like opening with a reassurance of sorts: where you come from – Herkunft (‘origin’) – can, indeed, be found at some mythic confluence of time and place. Origins are not only localisable; they can also be projected back in time, with kinship serving as a well-established narrative and ideological ploy for staking out historical claims to belonging. The very first scene thus appears to preempt the text that follows by giving a rather firm answer to the question that the book's title vividly raises. The answer – the Romantic idea of origins – seems to be reinforced when Stanišić takes his readers from Višegrad to the village of Oskoruša, and with that, deeper into the past. At Oskoruša's cemetery, many of the tombstones bear the narrator's last name: Stanišić. What could possibly be more affirming in a tale of origins than a mountain village, where even the ground is inscribed with proof of one's ancestry?³

Stanišić proves to be a formidable storyteller because he involves his readership in something like a theatre of origins, presenting us with the essential trappings of a ‘filiative’ form of belonging – a term we borrow from Edward Said and Timothy Brennan to designate communities predicated on inheritance, descent, and circumstances of birth – only to then reject the premise and ontological primacy ascribed to these ‘natural’ social bonds.⁴ Expressed in the well-known terms of National Socialist ideology, Blut (‘blood’) and Boden (‘soil’) not only merge here but become inseparable, with their union counteracting – that is, stabilising – the purportedly modern volatility of origins.⁵ From the perspective that this special issue of Critical Quarterly adopts, a striking moment comes to the fore: Stanišić's spectacle of origins plays out in what