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Leavis
BY NASRULLAH MAMBROL ON MARCH 18, 2016 • ( 1 )
F. R. Leavis became the major single target for the new critical theory of the
1970s. Both Raymond Williams in Politics and Letters (1979) and Terry
Eagleton in Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983) bear witness to his
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 of
cultural politics, and much of the ‘great’ literature of the past (especially but
not exclusively, from before Eliot’s ‘dissociation of sensibility’ in the
seventeenth century) bears witness to the ‘organic’ strength of pre-industrial
cultures. The past and past literature, as for Arnold and Eliot once more, act as a
measure of the ‘wasteland’ of the present age – although the work of the ‘great’
moderns (Eliot 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 for the New Critics,
too, great works of literature are vessels in which humane values survive; but
for Leavis they are also to be actively deployed in an ethicosociological cultural
politics. Paradoxically then, and precisely because of this, Leavis’s project is
both elitist and culturally pessimistic. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that
in the twentieth century it became so profoundly popular and influential; had
indeed until quite recently become naturalized as ‘Literary Studies’.