ABSTRACT
In the introduction to a recent posthumously published book of Raymond Williams’s essays, the editor commends what he calls “the steady strength” of Williams’s work over many decades. In a rather strange compliment, he points out that the most persistent conjunction in the titles of Williams’s books has been “and” ( Pinkney, 1989, p. 8). Culture and Society, Marxism and Literature, Politics and Letters: the present volume could have maintained the tradition with the title Politics and Modernism, instead of its actual title of The Politics of Modernism. The irony of this endorsement is that Williams was one of the few people writing in critical cultural studies who did not succumb to the dangers of that misleadingly innocent conjunction. One of my intentions in this paper, despite my own title, is to address the question “What is wrong with the word ‘and’?”
