Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: I am concerned to make it really a university, something that is more than a collocation of specialist departments-to make it a centre of human consciousness: perception, knowledge, judgment and responsibility.And perhaps I have sufficiently indicated on what lines I would justify my seeing the centre of a university in a vital English School… I will only say that the academic is the enemy and that the academic can be beaten, as we who ran Scrutiny for twenty years proved.We were-and we knew we were-Cambridge-the essential Cambridge in spite of Cambridge.(F. R. Leavis, Two Cultures?29) O CRITIC HAS MADE A GREATER CLAIM FOR THE CULTURAL CENTRALITY OF ENGLISH and the practice of literary criticism than F. R. Leavis-not even I. A. Richards, the thinker arguably responsible for the motivating principle of Leavis's criticism that 'there is a necessary relationship between the quality of an individual's response to art and his general fitness for humane existence' ('Manifesto' 5).'Leavis conveys persistently the absolute conviction that criticism is a central, life-giving pursuit', writes George Steiner (233), and Leavis's influence on literary criticism as it was practised in English-speaking universities from the N 1 'The distinction Oxford/Cambridge', as Francis Mulhern reminds us, 'has undoubtedly been over-polarized, and indeed mythologized, on many occasions; nevertheless, it is well-grounded in cultural-historical fact' (19, n. 44).2 'In all the essays I wrote at Cambridge', writes Leavis's ex-student, David Ellis, 'I cannot recall ever providing a footnote, and there certainly seemed a relative indifference among my teachers
Source: Australian Humanities Review
DOI: 10.56449/07658734
Author: William Christie
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4297571830