Introduction: The Keywords Collective

Introduction The Keywords Collective T his issue of ESC: English Studies in Canada celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of the journal, first published in Spring 1975 under the editorship of the late Lauriat Lane, Jr.1 The history of ESC has been rehearsed on several occasions over the last thirty years, most recently in Clara Thomas’s “The Beginning of English Studies in Canada”which appeared in the twenty-fifth anniversary issue. As a way of marking our thirtieth birthday—the age past which we can no longer be trusted—we are looking back to another publishing event of similar vintage: the 1976 publication of Raymond Williams’s Keywords. In what follows, thirteen scholars meditate on the continuing valency of thirteen keywords—from Art to Work. This collage of responses offers an idiosyncratic snapshot of where we have come from and where we are now. “The river is moving / The blackbird must be flying.” But, to paraphrase Heraclitus, you can’t step on the same blackbird twice. If Williams’s keywords were still as culturally situated today as they were in 1976, a retrospective wouldn’t be necessary. Or maybe it would. 1 Lauriat Lane, Jr. passed away in March. Please see Rowland McMaster’s tribute in the last issue of ESC. ESC 30.4 (December 2004): 1-4 The Keywords Collective is Cecily Devereux, Michael O’Driscoll, Harvey Quamen, Cheryl Suzack, Jo-Ann Wallace, and Robert Wilson. In the final stages of preparing this Readers’Forum, we were joined by Brad Bucknell, Christine Ferguson, and Mark Simpson. As Annabel Patterson and Terry Goldie suggest in this issue, Williams’ s project wasn’t exhaustive then either. That’s no great indictment of Wil­ liams, of course—today, we’re sceptical of totalities and we value partial perspectives. There’ s widespread admiration for Williams’s achievement, even when we disagree with him. And Williams’s ambition continues to astound. He sought to resolve the post-war academic parallax, to stem verboseness in the sea, to combat nincompated pedagogues. What began as a drawer overstuffed with twenty years’worth of paper has provided a spit of dry land, a point of departure for more than one generation of scholars. Whether Williams then was anything more than a watery realist has yet to be determined. Whether ours is still “a wordy, watery age I That whispered to the sun’ s compas­ sion” has yet to be argued. Like a sunny port of call or a baggage claim in a busy airport, Keywords is an opportunity to examine all that we can’t leave behind. This forum thus serves in part as an opening and unpacking of a small collection ofbaggage—or the revisiting of particular ports—and a collective meditation on how, as Williams showed in 1976, values and usage in academic language continue to change—or not—over time, in shifting contexts, and in relation to various pressures and circumstances. Like the automated castle and the city in Thomas Wharton’ s Salamander, the terrain of language changes around us, and it’s worth pausing from time to time to get our chronotopic bearings. Our selection, of course, is somewhat less, at 13, than Williams’ s 131, and this second look can only be partial and preliminary. But it’s not exactly random either. Members of the editorial team (here The Key­ words Collective) each chose the two terms we most wanted to include in the forum—claimed them, that is, and at some points fought over who “got” them. We were surprised in some cases to find words we hoped to reconsider were not in Williams’s vocabulary of culture and society at all—patriarchy, for instance, or gender. We discussed contributors we thought would meditate in compelling ways on the words we selected, and solicited responses to the keyword challenge. In some cases contribu­ tors wanted to write on another word; in some cases a keyword was added when we found a sudden connection between the work of a scholar and what Williams wrote on a particular term. With one additional solicited contribution over the allotted two apiece, we ended up with thirteen ways of looking at Keywords itself. Keywords provides an...