F. R. Leavis

9 Key excerpts on "F. R. Leavis"

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  The Cultural Critics

  From Matthew Arnold to Raymond Williams

  • Lesley Johnson(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5 F. R. Leavis

  DOI: 10.4324/9781032645414-5

  Controversies about F. R. Leavis and his work have created long-term schisms within universities in a number of countries. Yet the enmity between the different factions has focused on Leavis’s literary judgments of particular works and his general approach to literary criticism. Disputes over these issues have obscured the fundamental ideological stance in Leavis’s work and represented the conflict between him and other literary intellectuals as existing largely at the level of literary criticism. The absence of any developed discussion of Leavis’s social and educational ideas reveals the extent to which literary intellectuals have avoided the fundamental issues underlying Leavis’s ideas on literary criticism. Their silence on this matter suggests a reluctance to reflect on their own social and educational assumptions.1

  Leavis began publishing works in the 1930s, his first book being Culture and Environment (1933) written in conjunction with Denys Thompson. Until the demise of Scrutiny in 1953, much of his work was published in article form first in that journal which he and other literary people, including his wife Q. D. Leavis, had set up at Cambridge. His work always included essays of literary criticism and essays on social and educational issues. The combination of these interests, he claimed, stems from the belief basic to his work that literature cannot be separated from life; he advocated Matthew Arnold’s dictum that literature is a ‘criticism of life’.

  In Leavis’s writings the sense of historical continuity with the literary figures of the past that appeared to sustain Arnold has gone. Leavis’s ideas bear the marks of his self-conscious return to Arnold and by the 1960s and early 1970s his writings were marred increasingly by a sense of frustration and desperation. Eagleton explains this temper of Leavis’s writings, which always pervaded his works to some extent, in terms of the petty bourgeois framework from within which he operated. Speaking of Leavis, and more generally of his followers who wrote for the journal Scrutiny, Eagleton diagnoses their central preoccupations as being of an élitist nature, committed to a framework of overarching authority. Revealing their petty bourgeois character, the members of this group reject at once ‘the democratic “anarchy”, it discerns below it and the ineffectualness of the actual authority posed above it’.2

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  Reading Media Theory

  Thinkers, Approaches and Contexts

  • Brett Mills, David M. Barlow(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 5 F.R. Leavis

  DOI: 10.4324/9781315832975-5

  Reading: Leavis, F.R. (1930) Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture, Cambridge: Minority Press.

  Introduction to F.R. Leavis

  Frank Raymond Leavis, or F.R. Leavis as he is more commonly known, is renowned for his outspoken views on popular media and entertainment forms in the 1930s, and is identified with a form of literary criticism that gradually evolved into what we now know as cultural studies (Scannell 2007 : 99; Turner 1996 : 12).

  The emergence of this new field of study occurred shortly after the Second World War (1939–45) through the work of Raymond Williams's Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961; see Chapter 17 in this book), and

  Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1958)

  . Moreover, it fourished when the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was established at Birmingham University in 1964, with Richard Hoggart as the founding director (see Chapter 11 ). While Hoggart and Williams were protégés of Leavis, their backgrounds, interests and analytic approaches to the study of culture were quite different from those of their mentor (Scannell 2007 : 103).

  Leavis's primary interest was in literary texts and modern literature in particular. Essentially, his aim was to identify ‘a canon of rich and rewarding texts’ which could be returned to ‘as privileged objects’ (Turner 1996 : 22). In this respect, the approach adopted by Hoggart and Williams differed markedly. They adapted Leavis's literary analysis into a form of textual analysis which could be used to ‘read’ other cultural texts, such as popular fiction and popular music (Turner 1996 : 12).

  Having been appropriated from literary studies, ‘text’ — previously restricted to a medium on which something was written — was now being used to describe the ‘object or site of one's analysis’, whether this was a film, television programme or a photograph (Turner 1996 : 22). As the meaning of ‘text’ changed, so did the intentions of those doing the analysis. The newly adapted form of textual analysis involved ‘examining the formal internal features and contextual location of a text to ascertain what readings or meanings’ could be gained from it (Hartley 2002b

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  F.R. Leavis

  Essays and Documents

  • Ian MacKillop, Richard Storer(Authors)
  • 1995(Publication Date)
  • Sheffield Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. Third Edition. London: Harvester, 1993. [See Chapter i: 'New Critic-ism, Moral Formalism and F. R. Leavis', pp. 10—26] Simons, Michael; and Raleigh, Mike. 'Where we've been: A brief history of English Teaching', The English Magazine 8 (1981), pp. 23-28. Snow, Philip; Annan, Noel; Black Michael; Rose, Steven; and Steiner, George. 'Symposium: The Two Cultures Re-visited', The Cambridge Review, March 1987-Storer, R. G. 'English, Education and the University: An Historical Study of the Work and Significance of F. R. Leavis'. Unpublished Ph.D thesis, University of Sheffield, 1993. Strickland, Geoffrey. 'Great Traditions: The Logic of the Canon'. In Encyclopaedia of Literature and Criticism, pp. 696-707. Edited by Martin Coyle, Peter Garside, Malcolm Kelsall and John Peck. London: Routledge, 1990. Widdowson, Peter. 'W(h)ither English?'. In Encyclopaedia of Literature and Criti-cism, pp. 1221—1236. Edited by Martin Coyle, Peter Garside, Malcolm Kelsall and John Peck. London: Routledge, 1990. Willinsky, John. 'Literary Theory and Public Education: The Instance of F. R. Leavis', Mosaic 21.3 (1988), pp. 165-177. Wilson, Keith. 'Academic Fictions and the Place of Liberal Studies: A Leavis Inheritance'. In University Fiction, pp. 57—73. Edited by David Bevan. Rodopi Perspectives on Modern Literature 5. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990. 'Correspondence' [on the Leavises], The Cambridge Quarterly XV.i & XV.3 (1986). 'Distaste for Leavis', Letters to London Review of Books, 8 November 1990 — 24 January 1991. Notes Full publication details for all Leavis's books are given in T. R. Leavis: A Reader's Guide'. They are referred to by title only in the notes below and, unless otherwise stated, the page numbers given are those of the original editions. I N T R O D U C T I O N 1. Noel Annan, Our Age: The Generation That Made Post-War Britain (London: Fontana, 1991), p. 435. 2. F. R. Leavis, 'English — Unrest and Continuity', TLS, 29 May 1969, p.

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  A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory

  • Raman Selden, Peter Widdowson, Peter Brooker(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Moral formalism: F. R. Leavis

  F. R. Leavis and Leavisite criticism, preeminently associated with the journal Scrutiny (1932–53), held sway in British literary studies from the 1930s to the 1960s, if not, in an unconscious form, beyond. He became accordingly the major target for the new critical theory of those later decades. Raymond Williams in Politics and Letters (1979) and Terry Eagleton in Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983) bear witness to just this. Apropos of Leavis’s The Great Tradition (1948), Williams remarks, for example, that by the early 1970s, in relation to the English novel, Leavis ‘had completely won. I mean if you talked to anyone about [it], including people who were hostile to Leavis, they were in fact reproducing his sense of the shape of its history.’ More generally, Eagleton writes: ‘Whatever the “failure” or “success” of Scrutiny … the fact remains that English students in England today [ 1983] are “Leavisites” whether they know it or not, irremediably altered by that historic intervention.’

  Leavis, profoundly influenced by Matthew Arnold and by T. S. Eliot (his New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) in effect first taught the English how to ‘read’ The Waste Land ), was, like Richards and Empson above, one of the new academics in Cambridge in the late 1920s and early 1930s who turned the English syllabus away from the bellettrism of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and others, and put it at the centre of arts education in the university. His collection Education and the University (1943), including the widely influential ‘A Sketch for an “English School”’ and ‘Mass Civilization and Minority Culture’, bears witness to the fact that Leavis was an educator as much as he was a critic, and to the practical, strategically anti-theoretical nature of his work (see also, for example, later works like English Literature in Our Time and the University , 1969, The Living Principle: English as a Discipline of Thought , 1975). In a famous exchange with the American critic René Wellek, for example (see Leavis’s essay ‘Literary Criticism and Philosophy’, 1937, in The Common Pursuit

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  Rationality, Education and the Social Organization of Knowledege (RLE Edu L)

  • Chris Jenks(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  There is a very current view in our world that philosophy should be left to the philosophers, sociology to the sociologists, and death to the dead. I believe this is one of the great heresies – and tyrannies – of our time. I reject totally the view that in matters of general concern (such as the meaning of life, the nature of the good society, the limitation of the human condition) only the specialist has the right to have opinions – and then only in his own subject. ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’ signs have, thank goodness, become increasingly rare in our countryside; but they still spring like mushrooms round the high-walled estates of our literary and intellectual life. In spite of all our achievements in technology we are, outside our narrow professional fields, mentally one of the lazieat and most sheep-like ages that has ever existed ... The main reason dissatisfaction haunts our century, as criticism haunted the eighteenth and complacency the nineteenth, is precisely because we are losing sight of our most fundamental human birthright: to have a self-made opinion on all that concerns us. John Fowles (1964)

  INTRODUCTION

  This paper is constituted in addressing a number of issues, and is available for reading in at least as many ways. It attempts, initially and explicitly, an exegetic account of F.R.Leavis's ideas on the importance to contemporary British socio-cultural life of English literature and its disciplined, critical study. Some parts of this paper are extracted from a longer, on-going work which ex-amines social aspects and implications of some works of recent English literary criticism. Constitutive of such an examination is a consideration of the implications for sociological thought of those works, which may be found reflected in this paper.

  Leavis has been centrally involved for more than a decade in what is known as the debate over ‘two cultures’. Much of the heat of controversy has now passed from it and, in conventional wisdom, the laurels of victory belong to Leavis's initial antagonist, C.P.Snow. Yet so much of Leavis's most recent writing has been in specific relation to this debate that his contributions to it become unavoidably an implicit concern of this paper. By attempting to explicate Leavis's central, specific arguments in the controversy – that there is, and can be, only one culture (in the sense, that is, in which the term culture is typically employed by the debate's major contributors) – this paper may be seen as an implicit and peripheral contribution to it, and one that challenges the current verdict upon it.

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  Literary Criticism, Culture and the Subject of 'English': F.R. Leavis and T.S. Eliot

  • Zhang Dandan, Dandan Zhang(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 4 is the longest in my book.

  Even though accepting that Leavis’s ‘ “criticism of life” … now operates within the discipline [of English] only in residual, discredited, and nostalgic forms’, and holding that it was works by Richards and Empson that ‘really enabled the birth of the critical paradigm’, Joseph North, discussing the development of English Studies over the century in his recent book Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (2017), nevertheless admits that ‘the really momentous changes in the nature of Anglophone literary studies’ were made possible by Leavis and Scrutiny. Thus ‘Richards’ setting up of literary criticism on a disciplinary footing had its most dramatic effects through the medium of F. R. Leavis and the Scrutiny critics’.19 North’s preoccupation with the dispute ‘between literary “scholars” and literary “critics” ’ (p. 1) is also reflected in this present study as in our discussion of the rivalry between the ‘man of letters’ and the university scholar/teacher of English (see pp. 109–110). Whilst North’s book gives a broad account of the issue in question, my Chapter 4 deals with it through the specific focus on Leavis and Eliot, and their influence on what North called ‘the scholarly turn’ in literary criticism (p. 2). Whilst Eliot as I have noted was a major impetus behind ‘the Scrutiny movement in education’, he actively challenges the educational ideals relating to English Studies that Leavis and his circle advocate: we therefore have the irony that Eliot’s work and ideas should have a crucial place in the university English syllabus, according to Leavis, whilst Eliot forcibly rejects the teaching of English literature at university level (nor does he seem to believe in it as a school subject either, as we shall see). Thus my chapter compares writings by Leavis such as ‘How to Teach Reading’, ‘Mr. Eliot and Education’, Education and the University, to name only a few, with Eliot’s ‘Modern Education and the Classics’, ‘The Classics and the Man of Letters’, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism and a great deal of other works to examine how much use Leavis makes of Eliot in his pedagogy whilst fundamental differences in cultural outlook discussed in Chapter 3

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  Cambridge Minds

  • Richard Mason(Author)
  • 1994(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Increasingly, however, respect for this and the lessons it had to offer could not be at the expense of consideration of the questions it raised, questions that new circumstances - the expansion and diversification of the student body in higher edu- cation, to cite only one - were making it hard to avoid. Those questions bore, for example, on the relations between literature and other forms of writing and representation, asking for new kinds of attention that would not simply separate literature off as some declared area of value and ignore or dismiss other forms of cultural production (the actual effect of Leavis's negative critique of the media was to remove them in toto from English); on the very idea of 'literature', seeking to understand its socio-historical constructions and assumptions and also to realign English studies with writing current today (in the 1920s, Richards and Leavis had been directly concerned with some of the key modernist writing of the time, but Leavis's tradition then served as an embattled standard that excluded contemporary creative work, and his influence generally fed into an academic establishment of canonical texts, of what counted in and as 'doing English'); on the understanding of language in literary studies (seeking to raise issues of language in history as social production and of the materiality of language as constitutive - not merely reflective - of subjectivity, to end the separation from language studies that practical criticism in its development from Richards through Leavis to exercise and exam- ination had actually become: the words on the page for the assumed Cambridge English 'close' reading and 'direct' response); on matters of evaluation (how do we, can we find bases for assessment, make necessary judgements, avoiding appeals to 'life' but equally avoiding the indifference of relativism or of the academicist severance of study and analysis from any matter of values?).

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  A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory

  • Raman Selden, Peter Widdowson, Peter Brooker(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  A major plank in Leavis’s platform, in other words, was to identify the ‘great works’ of literature, such as those assembled in The Great Tradition; to sift out the dross of ‘mass’ or ‘popular’ fiction, for example, and to establish the Arnoldian and Eliotian ‘tradition’ or ‘canon’. This is necessary because these are the works which should be taught in a university English course as part of the process of cultural filtering, refining and revitalizing under- taken on behalf of the nation’s cultural health. In particular, such works will promote the values of ‘Life’ (a crucial but undefined term: ‘the major novelists . . . are significant in terms of that human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life’) against the forces of materialism, 1 8 A R E A D E R ’ S G U I D E T O C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A R Y T H E O R Y barbarism and industrialism in a ‘technologico-Benthamite’ society: they represent a ‘minority culture’, in other words, embattled within a ‘mass civilisation’. Just as Leavis’s moral fervour distinguishes him from the more abstract or aesthetic formalism of the New Critics, so too does his emphatically sociological and historical sense. Literature is a weapon in the battle for ‘civilisation’, and much of the ‘great’ literature of the past bears witness to the ‘organic’ strength of pre-industrial cultures. The past and past literature, then, as for Arnold and Eliot, act as a measure of the ‘wasteland’ of the present age – although the work of the ‘great’ moderns (Eliot, once more and D. H. Lawrence, for example), in its ‘necessary’ difficulty, complexity and commitment to cultural values, is also mobilized on ‘Life’s’ behalf in the inimical world of the twentieth century. As with the New Critics, great works of literature are vessels in which humane values survive; but for Leavis they are also to be actively deployed in an ethico-sociological cultural politics.

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  Postcolonial George Eliot

  • Oliver Lovesey(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  This examination system emerged in 1858, in the context of India’s incorporation into the British empire. The effects of these influences are witnessed at least indirectly in a number of recent postcolonial re- engagements with Eliot. THE LEAVIS TRADITION F.R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition (1948) famously reinstated Eliot in an emerging canon of English literature when just two decades earlier J. Lewis May could refer to Eliot as being “not very widely read nowa- days,” “the object not so much of attack as of neglect—a far worse fate” (vii). Great novels for Leavis should act as therapy for troubled times, and he suggests Eliot’s work, in particular, may be good medicine for present despair: “For us in these days, it seems to me, she is a pecu- liarly fortifying and wholesome author” (Great 145). Leavis’s elevation of Eliot belonged to an approach to English studies as a discipline with 5 CONCLUSION: THE LEAVIS TRADITION, EDUCATIONAL … 219 significance for the fate of a culture and even a civilization, rooted in the English language and its “moral tradition” as embodied in its “great” books, which in turn grow the language itself (28). Leavis’s elevation of language as the cultural repository of a people may be anticipated in his wife Q.D. Leavis’s 1932 assessment of Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss. 7 Such a regard for language resembles the postcolonial articula- tion of the primacy of African languages as cultural archive in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind (1986); though he was taught within a colonial educational system in Kenya that valorized Leavis, Ngũgĩ’s for- mulation had different roots. 8 While The Great Tradition sometimes has been considered to be “a book which reaffirmed imperial ‘Englishness’” and placed Leavis “on the side of the coloniser” (Storer, F.R. Leavis 75, 123), this interpretive legacy is contested.

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