Join Tate Liverpool and world-renowned cultural theorist Tony Bennett for the third in the series of Keywords lectures in Liverpool.
Positioned between the collaborative exhibition Keywords at Iniva London (27 March – 18 May 2013) and Tate Liverpool (27 February-11 May 2014) – and inspired by Raymond Williams's influential book Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976) – is an ambitious series of lectures, which aims to consider which Keywords are of particular relevance for culture and society today. Each speaker has been asked to select and reflect on a Keyword from Williams's book that resonates with her or him.
In his lecture, Tony Bennett will address the relationships between the aesthetic and the anthropological definitions of culture that Williams provides, by looking more closely at the history and uses of the concept of culture as a way of life.
On the evening there is an opportunity for those attending to actively engage with the speaker's paper and share their thoughts on the featured keyword.
Professor Tony Bennett is Research Professor in Social and Cultural Theory at the Institute for Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney. His research has left indelible marks on the fields of sociology, cultural studies, literary studies, museology and postcolonial studies, through such well-known books as Formalism and Marxism (1979), The Birth of the Museum (1995) and, most recently, Making Culture, Changing Society (2013). As co-editor of New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (2005), Bennett is ideally placed to speak from, and to, Williams's legacy.
Raymond Williams (1921–1988) was one of the most significant thinkers of the postwar period. After returning from war in 1945, Williams noted that the usage and meanings of everyday words that repeatedly crop up in our discussions of culture and society had changed. These changes fascinated Williams who in 1976 published Keywords, in which he analysed the use and meanings of over a hundred words.