Structures of feeling and socio-cultural formations: the significance of literature and experience to Raymond William's sociology of culture

Abstract

Williams elaborates the concept of structures of feeling in different ways at important points in his writings. This gives it a particular methodological signifi cance in relating the extraordinariness of imaginative literature to the ordinariness of cultural process. It is employed particularly to show the signifi cance of literature for the articulation of alternatives to dominant world views, and thus to the politics of social change. Williams’s different formulations of the concept are discussed in terms of their ways of relating refl exive experience to institutional structures and in relation to the genetic structuralism of Goldmann and Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and cultural fi eld. Three types of criticisms are considered, which have in common the contention that the concept is unclear. Operationalized in analysing literature and its symbols, it can contribute towards clarifi cation of the complexity of the processes of refl exive communication of experience which are at the root of social order and change.