ABSTRACT
Twenty years on from this statement, ‘Raymond Hoggart’ still lives as part of the folklore of cultural studies. Any adequate assessment of especially Williams’s relationship with cultural studies must begin by confronting the phenomenon of the maintenance of this curious composite figure. However little or much we need ‘founding fathers’, the ongoing conflation of the projects of Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart hardly ‘still seems reasonable’ now. ‘Raymond Hoggart’ has been a useful construct for some recent attempts to set the agenda for self-reflection within the field. The degree of difference between Raymond Williams’s and Richard Hoggart’s positions in the late 1950s and early 1960s is underplayed to secure an effective narrative contrast with cultural studies’ subsequent post-Althusserian phase (Turner, 1990; Grossberg, 1988). Hall’s 1980 paradigmatic contrast between contemporaneously competing ‘culturalist’ and ‘structuralist’ paradigms (1980a) is thus sequentially narrativized. This can result in a containment of even Williams’s mature work within the moment of ‘Raymond Hoggart’. Thus positions only ever held by Hoggart are attributed to Williams’s cultural materialism (Hunter, 1988a).2 Even positions Williams openly criticized in Hoggart are attributed to him (Easthope, 1991:72).3
