Comrades

F.R. Leavis

Leavis and I had a love-hate relationship. Many of his ideas inspired mine, but we had one basic difference. Leavis was a close reader—he looked at the poem or novel in and of itself, thinking that everyone you needed to know was in the text itself; I, however, believed it was important to consider the wider cultural context in which a work was composed.

What did we share? Good old-fashioned disdain for the snooty English academic establishment, whose main concern was not to promote more enlightened critical thought but to maintain the status quo.

Terry Eagleton

Terry, bless his heart, edited a little book on my work called Raymond Williams: Critical Perspectives (1989). Obviously, I had a big impact on Terry when he was my student at Cambridge. But it wasn't all unicorns, lollipops, and rainbows. Terry also wrote a strongly worded article criticizing my writing style for not being edgy enough. I always considered myself sort of hardcore, so it stung when Terry described my writing as "a conjuring of weight out of emptiness which lacks all edge and abrasiveness" (source). With friends like that, as they say!

Pierre Bourdieu

This French sociologist and I shared a passion for media studies—but when it came to television, we both thought outside the box. (LOL.) We both insisted that media, such as television, should always be studied in relation to the state, to politics, and to education. It may be commonplace now, but back in our day, it was just dawning on us that the media had all sorts of alliances that control what information we have access to. Imagine how naive we used to be.

Rivals

George Orwell

I know we're all supposed to think his book 1984 is the bee's knees, but I respectfully disagree with all of those Orwell lovers, because I think he could have made his political critique more widely meaningful. Sure, he flipped the bird to Stalin's Russia and to the oppressions of a totalitarian government (hear, hear to that!), but you don't have to leave home to find an oppressive government. Our good old Western governments are a bunch of conservative, bureaucratic, corrupt power-abusers, too.

Marshall McLuhan

This bigwig Canadian media critic and I had a little healthy competition going on, what with our shared interests in media theory, technology, and society. But when I wrote Television: Technology and Cultural Form in 1974, I basically was saying game on. See, McLuhan was just a little more cynical than I was—he thought that technology would eventually control society and our very lives. Can you believe that? I said—hey, no way. We humans stand a chance against this so-called "technological determinism." Never give up, right?

Catherine Gallagher

This literary critic had a bone to pick with my definition of "culture." If you want one example of my definition, see my book Keywords, but the thing is, I talked about culture for my entire career. Look, I may have founded Cultural Studies, but that doesn't mean I was entirely clear on the meaning of culture—it's super shifty. Gallagher didn't like how I used "society" and "culture" interchangeably because she felt that it watered down my definition of culture. And yes, these are the kinds of things that turn fellow academics into rivals.