Keywords (the Remake)

The film industry has long made it a practice to recycle films, remaking, sometimes repeatedly, the same stories. While this practice is often held up as evidence of Hollywood's lack of imagination and unwillingness to take risks, not all remakes are inferior to their originals. Sometimes it takes the industry multiple tries to get it right, as in the case of the Maltese Falcon, which had been adapted twice before John Huston remade the film with Humphrey Bogart in 1941. Sometimes a good film is remade as a great film, as when The Front Page (1931) was remade as His Girl Friday (1940). Very seldom does the remake of a great film seem equal to or better than the original. Though there are some people who think Peter Jackson's 2005 version of King Kong surpassed the original 1933 film, more seem to have wondered why this story needed to be filmed for the third time. There was almost universal agreement that Gus Van Sant set himself up for inevitable failure in remaking Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, especially as the later film (1998) copied the original 1960 version shot for shot.

I'm not sure whether Raymond Williams's Keywords is regarded with as much reverence by scholars of literary and cultural studies as Hitchcock's Psycho is by film critics, but the comparison is close enough to be illustrative. Williams's book has been an indispensable reference and a useful textbook almost since the date of its publication in 1976. Some of the entries, in part because they were recycled by Williams himself in places like Marxism and Literature, have become part of the required intellectual equipment for practitioners of cultural studies. Williams's locating of the emergence of "literature" in the nineteenth century as a term for imaginative writing of a certain quality or importance was essential to understanding the history of English as a discipline and to the emergence of cultural studies. Similarly, Williams's distinguishing of three categories of usage of "culture" has provided cultural studies with a widely shared terminological starting point.

In New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris, three of the leading practitioners of cultural studies, have undertaken the daunting task of remaking Williams's classic work. This distinguished trio has not imitated the original slavishly, as Gus Van Sant treated Hitchcock, but they leave no doubt that Williams provided their model. The proper filmic equivalent might be the "update," such as Switching Channels (1988), a film that moves the story of The Front Page/His Girl Friday from a newspaper to a television newsroom, apparently to better reflect the culture of America in the late 1980s. The editors justify producing a New Keywords by asserting that the original "is now showing signs of age." They claim to improve upon it by taking account of new usage of the terms Williams discusses, by adding words that have recently emerged as keywords out of new social movements, and by deleting words that they believe are no longer important. There are other distinctions worth noting. Bennett, Grossberg, and Morris have not written New Keywords, but instead have edited a collection of entries prepared by sixty-one different contributors. Where Williams followed a standard formula for each entry, beginning with the term's emergence in English and tracing its history of usage in the language, contributors to the remake often deviate from this pattern. Finally, New Keywords includes a lengthy bibliography, a welcome feature that was absent from the original.

I've chosen to consider New Keywords through an analogy with the film industry because the kind of relationship this book has with Williams's Keywords is unusual—although not necessarily unprecedented—in the world of publishing. While it would be inaccurate to describe Keywords simply as a reference work, it is that among other things, and academic libraries typically keep a copy in the reference room. New editions of...