The Keywords Project The Keywords - Keywords for Today

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: MacCabe, Colin, editor. | Yanacek, Holly editor.
Title: Keywords for today : a 21st century vocabulary : the keywords project /
edited by Colin MacCabe and Holly Yanacek.Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2018. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018013234 (print) | LCCN 2018030170 (ebook) |ISBN 9780190636586 (updf) | ISBN 9780190636593 (epub) |
ISBN 9780190636579 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: English language21st centuryGlossaries, vocabularies, etc.
|English languageEtymology.

Classification: LCC PE1680 (ebook) | LCC PE1680.K47 2018 (print) |

DDC 428.1dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018013234

The Keywords Project is a radically collaborative, cross-institutional, and cross-disciplinary research initiative sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh, Jesus College Cambridge, and the academic journal Critical Quarterly. Over the past decade, the members of the Keywords Project have worked to update Raymond Williamss classic Keywords for the 21st century and new generations of readers.

As the Keywords Project concludes, the membership list includes some who have left the Project and others who joined while work was already underway, but all have contributed to the substance of this volume and of the website (http://keywords.pitt.edu/):

Sylvia Adamson, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics and Literary History, School of English, University of Sheffield

Kathryn Allan, Senior Lecturer in the History of English, University College London

Susan Z. Andrade, Associate Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh

Jonathan Arac, Director of the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh

Jennifer Davis, Faculty of Law and Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge

Alan Durant, Professor of Communication in the School of Law, Middlesex University, London

Philip Durkin, Deputy Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary

Matthew Eagleton-Pierce, Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy, SOAS University of London

Stephen Heath, Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and Keeper of the Old Library

Colin MacCabe, Distinguished Professor of English and Film, University of Pittsburgh

Seth Mehl, Research Associate, School of English, University of Sheffield

Arjuna Parakrama, Senior Professor of English, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka

Kellie Robertson, Associate Professor of English, University of Maryland

Holly Yanacek, Assistant Professor of German, James Madison University

In addition to these fourteen members of the Keywords Project, Keywords for Today brought together over twenty participants in University of Pittsburgh graduate seminars. More information about the seminar directed by Jonathan Arac and Colin MacCabe may be found in Critical Quarterly (2016), along with a sample of the students work; some others appear as part of this volume, and yet others appear on the website. These are the students and the words they worked on: Samuel Allen, Public; Amanda Awanjo, Trans; Sagnika Chanda, Man; Evan Chen, Gentrification; Max Ginsberg, Authority; Joshua Graber, Social; Sylvia Grove, Artificial; Treviene Harris, Privilege; Kaitlyn Haynal, Access; Adam Hebert, Occupy; Artan Hoxha, Fundamental; Nicholas Marsellas, Respect; Sarah Mejia, Digital; Alexandra Ouyang, Security; Lauren Posey, Gender; Sarah Schaefer, Love; Tetyana Shlikar, Network; Leonardo Solano, Diaspora; Nicholas Stefanski, Future; Marina Tyquiengco, Appropriation.

Key is a very old word in English with the simple sense of an instrument designed to be inserted into a lock and turned. Over time it has developed a whole range of figurative uses, and in its sense of a solution or explanation for a problem it undoubtedly informed Raymond Williamss choice of the term keywords to name the set of words for which he began to write glosses in the 1950s. These keywords helped to solve both a very particular and a very general problem with which he was wrestling in that decade. The particular problem was the meaning of culture. In 1948 T. S. Eliot had published Notes towards the Definition of Culture. Eliot was widely considered both as the greatest of living poets and the most important of literary critics, but his message was unambiguously conservative. If you valued culture, then you had to abandon the desire for a classless society, because culture could only be produced by a class-stratified society. As a socialist, Williams had struggled against these arguments, and he found his solution, almost by chance, in the Oxford English Dictionary: the dictionarys history of this complex word culture allowed him both to place Eliots argument within a development and also to find in that development alternative arguments, which linked the fullest form of culture to the fullest growth of democracy in a classless society. Eliots definition of culture effectively restricted it to the arts, but the dictionary revealed that this sense of the word dated back no further than the late nineteenth century. Earlier meanings of the word stretched back a further century, and they focused on a general process of intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic development. Those earlier senses led Williams to his own formulation of culture as a whole way of life. By this means he could value the solidarity that he understood to be the great cultural value of the working class into which he had been born, while he could also value those artistic productions to which Eliot had limited the sense of the word.

The OED not only provided a very specific answer to the particular problem of culture, it also provided the best evidence for the very slow and complicated process of social change which Williams was trying to understand in the 1950s. This had a deeply personal level, explored in his semi-autobiographical novel Border Country, but it was also a pressing political problem for anyone who agreed with Marxs analysis of the centrality of class struggle but who rejected Lenins call for violent and sudden revolution. As Williams tracked his