English Literature in our Time and the University: The Clark Lectures 1967

by F.R. Leavis

This book was first published by Cambridge in 1979. It is taken from the 1967 Clark Lectures and is in the first place a vigourous defence of the study of English in a modern university. Leavis is concerned with English Literature as a living reality, with the need for 'keeping alive, potent and developing the full human consciousness of ends and values and human nature that comes to us out of the long creative continuity of our culture'. Responsibility for maintaining this continuity, Leavis argues, can only be borne by a university with a strong humane centre - and English school, defined as a collaborative community of students and teachers. Leavis's concern, however, extends further than the question of university education, for he sees the university simply as one nucleus of a wider spiritual community that should form the mind and conscience of the country. This book will remain of interest to readers today.

210 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Frank Raymond "F.R." Leavis, CH was an English literary critic of the early-to-mid-twentieth century. He taught for much of his career at Downing College, Cambridge but often latterly at the University of York.

Reviews

[Donald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic and inspiring. Makes me wish I'd studied English. Now I want to read everything he's written.

[Nat]

Ignoring what sounds, from the current perspective, like crankiness about creeping Americanization, his sense that Hemingway is definitely not worthy of sustained attention, and the "technological-Benthamite" worldview, Leavis's arguments resonate with Cavell's views on the role of criticism and theory, and Cavell himself responds to this with a reflection on the role of movies in humanistic education ("Leopards in Connecticut", an early version of the chapter on Bringing up Baby in Pursuits of Happiness).

There's one argumentative seam running through the book that is clearest in Appendix III. Leavis on one hand wants to make the case that the study of English can be pursued with the same high standards that the study of mathematics and the sciences can be pursued in the university, while denying that the study of English is akin to the study of those disciplines, since it involves human reactions to works of literature that are definitely not "scientific". In Jonathan Kramnick's recent book, Criticism and Truth, there is roughly the same problem and Kramnick's solution is to argue that there is a distinctive kind of practical knowledge that can be had in literary studies, namely "close reading" (I think that solution doesn't really work, for reasons I point out in my longer review). Leavis's solution to the problem is *not* to say that literary studies provides a distinctive kind of knowledge, but that its contribution is "creative work...on the contemporary intellectual cultural frontier in maintaining the critical function" (p. 192). The critical function is, according to Leavis, a kind of ongoing conversation among intelligent, serious readers and upholders of high "standards".

Critical judgment, Leavis says, "has the form, 'This is so, isn't it?'" And "What the critical activity aims at, in fact, is an exchange, a collaborative exchange, a corrective and creative interplay of judgments. For though my judgment asks to be confirmed and appeals for agreement that the thing is so; the response I expect at best will be of the form, 'Yes, but—', the 'but' standing for qualifications, corrections, shifts of emphasis, additions, refinements" (p. 47).

But "understanding...the nature of critical judgment in the abstract can amount to little" (p. 46). What matters is the exemplification of critical judgment, in astute readings of literary works, like D.H. Lawrence reading Hamlet and T.S. Eliot's reading of the metaphysical poets.