If I begin by saying that this is an essay about Raymond Williams’s relation to the institution of Cambridge English, I risk losing two groups of readers I wish to reach. One group, the insiders, may think that the story has all been told before.Williams—author of a dozen and a half wide-ranging books in literary, cultural, and media studies over a thirty-five-year period—is a major figure in late twentieth-century criticism. Much commentary on Williams since well before his death in 1988 has situated his work in relation to the powerful formation of literary studies at the university he attended before and after his military service in World War II. Surely, some will say, all that can be said on this topic has already been said. The other group, the outsiders, simply may not care. Even if they know and admire Williams, even if they grant the continued relevance of his most important books in contemporary criticism, they may not have much interest in Cambridge English. I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis, the two leading figures in shaping it, are not the household names they once were when, between them, they set the terms for Anglophone criticism in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Yet interest in Richards has revived in recent years, and Leavis’s students, or his students’ students, have until recently held important academic positions throughout the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. The effects of programmatic Leavisism—an ambitious academic initiative that grounded its resistance to modern commercialism both in close attention to literature and in strongly held judgments about such questions as “the great tradition” in the English novel—can still be

中文翻译：

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IA理查兹和雷蒙德威廉姆斯：阅读诗歌，阅读社会

如果我首先说这是一篇关于雷蒙德·威廉姆斯与剑桥英语机构关系的文章，那么我可能会失去我希望接触到的两组读者。一个内部人士可能认为这个故事之前已经讲过了。威廉姆斯——在三十五年的时间里撰写了十多本文学、文化和媒体研究方面的书籍——是一个重要的人物。二十世纪后期批评中的人物。自从 1988 年威廉姆斯去世之前，他的许多评论都将他的作品与他在二战服兵役前后所就读的大学中文学研究的强大形成联系起来。肯定有人会说，关于这个话题能说的都已经说了。另一个群体，外人，可能根本不在乎。即使他们认识并钦佩威廉姆斯，即使他们承认他在当代批评中最重要的著作仍然具有相关性，他们可能对剑桥英语不太感兴趣。IA Richards 和 FR Leavis 这两位塑造它的领军人物，不再是他们曾经的家喻户晓的名字，他们在 20 世纪下半叶为英语批评设定了条件。然而，近年来人们对理查兹的兴趣又重新抬头，利维斯的学生，或者他的学生的学生，直到最近才在英国和英联邦担任重要的学术职务。