Abstract
In the early 1930s Leavis wrote two articles attacking what he saw as the limitations of Marxism. The first, ‘Under Which King, Bezonian?’ appeared in Scrutiny on 3 December 1932, the second, ‘Marxism and Cultural Continuity’ formed the prefatory statement to Leavis’s first collection of essays, For Continuity, published in 1933. A third article, ‘Restatement for Critics’, which appeared in Scrutiny on 4 March 1933, also addressed the challenge of Marxism though this was not its major concern.1
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
F.R. Leavis, ‘Marxism and Cultural Continuity’, preface to For Continuity (Cambridge: Minority Press, 1933) pp. 7–12; ‘Under Which King Bezonian?’, Scrutiny 1:3, December 1932, pp. 202–15; and ’Restatement for Critics’, Scrutiny 1:4, March 1933, pp. 315–23. All reprinted in F.R. Leavis, Valuation in Criticism and Other Essays, ed. G. Singh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) pp. 31–7; 38–45 and 46–53 respectively. Hereafter MCC, UWKB and RFC with page references - from Valuation in Criticism - given in the text. Strictly speaking ‘Restatement for Critics’ is, as Ian MacKillop notes, more to do with ‘the impact made upon Leavis by the appearance of Lawrence’s letters’ (edited by Huxley) which Leavis had reviewed in December 1932, Ian MacKillop, F.R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1995) p. 190. For further details see M.B. Kinch, William Baker and John Kimber, F.R. Leavis and Q.D. Leavis: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland Publishing, 1989) p.42. Nevertheless, Leavis’s comments on Marxism in that article, together with the date of it justify its being grouped with the other two. Another article that could be included on the same basis is ‘Towards Standards of Criticism’ in F.R. Leavis Anna Karenina and Other Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967/1973) pp. 219–34, which was originally the introduction to Towards Standards of Criticism: Selections from the Calendar of Modern Letters (London: Wishart, 1933) pp. 1–26.
Francis Mulhern, The Moment of ‘Scrutiny’ (London: Verso, 1979), pp. 79–80. The words are Mulhern’s. Compare Leavis, ‘the inevitability (and desirability) of drastic social change makes an active concern for cultural continuity the more essential’, F.R. Leavis, ‘Towards Standards of Criticism’, pp. 225–6.
A.L. Morton, ‘Culture and Leisure’ in Scrutiny 1:4, March 1933, pp. 324–6, 324.
Iain Wright, ‘F.R. Leavis: The Scrutiny Movement and the Crisis’ in Jon Clark, Margot Heinemann, David Margolies and Carol Snee (eds) Culture and Crisis in Britain in the Thirties (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1979) pp. 37–65, 55.
David Margolies ‘Left Review and Left Literary Theory’ in ibid., pp. 67–82, 68. See also Valentine Cunningham, who comments that the most typical understanding of the Marxist throughout the 1930s was of someone ‘prompt in sliding the analysis from one kind of crisis to another, from economics to the imagination, to the threat of war without once letting the argument falter’, Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University press, 1989) p. 42.
Wright, ‘F.R. Leavis: The Scrutiny Movement and the Crisis’ p. 54. Wright implies Butterfield was a Marxist but this is debatable. In The Whig Interpretation of History (New York: Norton, 1931/1965) Butterfield had attacked historians like Macaulay and Trevelyan for interpreting the past according to the needs of the present. The implication was that the present could not be explained as determined by the past, which was precisely the Marxist view: the contemporary crisis as determined by the history of class struggle. As B.J. Atkinson observes, ‘Butterfield, at this time, conceived of history as a means not of solving problems but of making people realize how complicated they were’, B.J. Atkinson ‘Historiography’ in C.B. Cox and A.E. Dyson (eds) The Twentieth Century Mind: History, Ideas and Literature in Britain 2: 1918–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972) pp. 57–67, 62. As Butterfield himself noted, ‘[t]he last word of the historian is not some fine, firm general statement; it is a piece of detailed research’, The Whig Interpretation of History, p. 73. This accent on the concrete matches Leavis’s own and so there is less difference between them than Wright implies.
H. Butterfield, ‘History and the Marxian Method’ in Scrutiny 1:4, March 1933, pp. 339–55. This is, of course, the same issue which contains ‘Restatement for Critics’.
Perry Anderson, ‘Components of the National Culture’, New Left Review 50, July—August 1968, pp. 3–57, 53.
F.R. Leavis, ‘The Marxian Analysis: A Review of The Mind in Chains, ed. C. Day Lewis (London: Muller, 1937) and Capitalist and Socialist by Beryl Pring (London: Methuen, 1937) in Scrutiny 6:2, September 1937, pp. 201–4, 203. Hereafter TMA with page references given in the text. For an account of middle-class writers and Marxism see Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties, pp. 211–14.
The question of Leavis and class deserves more attention than can be given here not least because class itself is such a notoriously difficult term to define, a fact not helped by its having been eclipsed in recent years by considerations of gender, sexuality and ethnicity. For accounts of Leavis and class see Noel Annan, ‘Bloomsbury and the Leavises’, in Jane Marcus (ed.) Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury: A Centenary Celebration (London: Macmillan, 1987) pp. 23–38 and F.W. Bateson, ’The Scrutiny Phenomenon’ in Sewanee Review 85:1, January—March 1977, pp. 144–52. Neither of these is particularly satisfactory, not least because they each assume a ‘classless’ position against which Leavis can seem petty and resentful.
Francis Mulhern (ed.) Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism (London: Longman, 1992) pp. 12–13.
The relevant essays here would be ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ and ‘On the Materialist Dialectic’, both in Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1977) pp. 89–128,163–218. See also ‘A Letter on Art’ in Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books,1977) vv. 221–7.
It is perfectly possible to interpret this statement in an altogether different way. Leavis’s emphasis on a discriminating minority and his equation of literature with order and hierarchy means that it can function in schools and universities as a way of reproducing and reinforcing the class divisions of capitalist society and hence it cannot so easily be seen as a means of resistance to that society. This claim has been made by John Willinsky who writes that Leavis’s work ’could serve as what has been described as the school’s legitimating role in the reproduction of social stratification’. John Willinsky, ‘Leavis,
Literary Theory and Public Education’, Mosaic 21: 2–3, 1988, pp. 165–77,173. On the relationship between education and ideology see Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, pp. 127–86. On the use of literature in education see Pierre Macherey and Etienne Balibar, ‘On Literature as an Ideological Form’, in Mulhern Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism, pp. 34–54.
See Antony Easthope, British Post-Structuralism Since 1968 (London: Routledge, 1988) pp. 19, 20.
Jean Baudrillard ‘The Mirror of Production’, in Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Oxford/Cambridge: Polity Press/Basil Blackwell, 1988) pp. 98–118,102.
Ibid., p. 103.
For an account of the relationship between literature and scientific management see James F. Knapp, Literary Modernism and the Transformation of Work (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988) esp. pp. 1–18.
Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (London: Harper Row, 1911/1964) p. 74.
F.R. Leavis, ‘Standards of Criticism’, in Leavis, Valuation in Criticism and Other Essays, pp. 244–52, 252. Hereafter SC with page references given in the text.
F.R. Leavis, ‘Judgement and Analysis’, in The Living Principle: ‘English’ as a Discipline of Thought (London: Chatto & Windus, 1975) pp. 71–154, 108. Hereafter J& A with page references given in the text.
George Sturt implies this in his comparative valuations of the sawyers and the wheelwrights. See George Sturt, The Wheelwright’s Shop (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923/1993) Chapters IV and VII.
Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England Since 1880 (London: Routledge, 1989). Ironically, there was a work science journal called The Human Factor, which was published during the late 1920s and early 1930s. See Gary Cross, Time and Money: The Making of Consumer Culture (London: Routledge, 1993) p. 97.
F.R. Leavis, ‘T. S. Eliot and English Literature’, in Valuation in Criticism, pp. 129–47, 142. Hereafter TSE & EL with page references given in the text.
T.W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978/1993) p. 47.
Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 1947/1991) D. 61.
Ibid., p. 41.
Ibid., p. 56.
Ibid., p. 57.
Ibid., p. 42.
Ibid., p. 48.
Ibid.. p.49.
See, for example, John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989). For a good overview of the field of cultural studies see David Harris, From Class Struggle to the Politics of Pleasure: The Effects of Gramscianism on Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1992).
See Harris, From Class Struggle to the Politics of Pleasure and Stephen Regan (ed.) The Politics of Pleasure: Aesthetics and Cultural Theory (Buckingham: Open University Press/Anglia Polytechnic University, 1992). For the view that pleasure should be the sole end of criticism see Barbara Kruger, Remote Control: Power, Cultures and the World of Appearances (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993). This view should be balanced against the following remark from Adorno: Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even when it is shown. Basically it is helplessness. It is flight; not as it is asserted, flight from a wretched reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance. The liberation which amusement promises is freedom from thought and negation. (’The Culture Industry: Enlightenment As Mass Deception’, in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1944/1992) pp. 120–67, 144.) Baudrillard makes a similar point. See Baudrillard, ‘Consumer Society’, in Baudrillard, Selected Writings, pp. 29–56, 46.
Georg Simmel, ‘Subjective Culture’, in Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald Levine (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971) pp. 227–34, 228.
T.W. Adorno, ‘Culture and Administration’, in T.W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J.M. Bernstein (London: Routledge,1991) pp. 93–113, 98.
Cross, Time and Money: The Making of Consumer Culture, p. 57. See also George Lansbury, My England (London: Selwyn & Blount, 1934). This forms a useful complement to the works of George Sturt. See also Martin Weiner, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) Chapter 4, esp. pp. 118–21; and Alun Hawkins, ‘The Discovery of Rural England’, in Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (eds) Englishness: Politics and Culture (London: Croom Helm, 1986) pp. 63–88.
Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980) provides a clear overview of this development.
Malcolm Bradbury, ‘The Impact of Literary Theory’, in Lisa Appignanesi (ed.), Ideas from France: The Legacy of French Theory (London: Free Association Books, 1989) pp. 7–15, 12.
See Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989) p. 160.
Criticism is used in its widest sense here, referring not just to literary criticism but to cultural criticism as well. In Leavis, of course, there was a close relation between the two. For an account of how’uneritical’ criticism can be see Christopher Norris, Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1992).
See O.L. Zangwill, ‘Psychology’ in C.B. Cox and A.E. Dyson (eds), The Twentieth Century Mind: History, Ideas and Literature in Britain 2: 1918–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972) pp. 171–95.
Arthur Koestler, ‘The Initiates’, Richard Crossman (ed.) The God That Failed: Six Studies in Communism (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1950) pp. 25–32, 30.
C.L. Mowat, Britain Between the Wars 1918–1939 (London: Methuen, 1955) p. 523.
W.W. Robson, Modern English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970) p. 125.
John Stevenson, British Society 1914–1945 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984/1990) p. 112.
Ibid., p. 381. The dance hall was one place where bodies were massed together. Although they represented a kind of freedom, for example, ’greater opportunities for women to go out and enjoy themselves’ they also contained the pleasures, energies, ‘undisciplined steps’ and ‘lack of propriety in bodily movements’ unleashed by the ‘wild sounds of “jazz”’. (Iain Chambers, Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience(London: Routledge, 1986) p. 135.) This containment was the work of ’a growing army of dance instructors led by Victor Sylvester, and the increasingly predictable metronome rhythms of the white dance bands’ (ibid., pp. 135–6).
J.B. Priestly, English Journey (London: Heinemann, 1934/1968) p. 314.
A.J.P. Taylor, quoted in Norman Page, The Thirties in Britain (London: Macmillan, 1990) p. 30. The quotation comes from A.J.P. Taylor, English History 1914–1945 (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1970) p. 433.
Ibid.
G.D.H. and M.I. Cole The Condition of Britain (London: Gollancz, 1937) mentioned in Stevenson. British Society 1914–1945, p. 345.
John Hilton, Rich Man, Poor Man (New York: Garland 1938/1944), mentioned in Stevenson, British Society 1914–1945, p. 345.
R.D. Charques, Contemporary Literature and the Social Revolution (London: Martin Secker, 1933) pp. 48–9. But see also George Orwell, ’Inside the Whale’ in Inside the Whale and Other Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957/1988) pp. 9–50.
Edgell Rickword, ‘Culture, Progress and English Tradition’, in Edgell Rickword, Literature in Society: Essays and Opinions II, ed. A. Young (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1978) pp. 93–104, 93.
Pasi Falk, The Consuming Body (London: Sage, 1994) p. 137.
Brian Massumi, ‘Everywhere You Want To Be: Introduction to Fear’, in Brian Massumi (ed.) The Politics of Everyday Fear (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 3–38, 7.
Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (London: Routledge, 1992) p. 6.
Ibid., p. 14.
Humphrey Jennings and Charles Madge (eds), Mass Observation DaySurvey: May 12 1937 (London: Faber, 1937/1987) p. iv. On Mass Observation see also Angus Calder and Dorothy Sheridan, Speak for Yourself A Mass Observation Anthology 1937–1949 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984).
Ibid., p. iii.
Ibid., p. iv.
F.R. Leavis, ‘Thought, Language and Objectivity’ in Leavis, The Living Principle, pp. 19–69, 49. Hereafter TL & O with page references given in the text.
On one page of one essay the word ‘assert’ occurs three times, the word ’force’ twice and the words ‘drive’ and ‘insist’ once. F.R. Leavis, ’English, “Unrest” and Continuity’, in F.R. Leavis, Nor Shall My Sword: Discourses on Pluralism, Compassion and Social Hope (London: Chatto & Windus, 1972) pp. 103–33, 120. Hereafter referred to as ELI & C, with page references given in the text. This should give some indication of how central to his criticism is Leavis’s vocabulary of force.
F.R. Leavis, ‘Reading Out Poetry’, in Leavis, Valuation in Criticism and Other Essays’, pp. 253–75, 268. Hereafter ROP, with page references given in the text.
For an overview of the role of the body in social theory see Bryan S. Turner, ‘Recent Developments in the Theory of the Body’, in Mike Featherstone, Mike Hepworth and Bryan S. Turner, (eds). The Body: Social Processes and Cultural Theory (London: Sage,1991/1992) pp. 1–35.
F.R. Leavis, ‘Johnson As Poet’, in F.R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit (Harmondsworth: Penguin/Chatto & Windus, 1962/1993) pp. 116–20, 118. Hereafter JAP with page references given in the text.
F.R. Leavis, ‘Literary Criticism and Philosophy’, in ibid., pp. 211–22, 213. Hereafter C & P, with page references given in the text.
F.R. Leavis, ‘Johnson and Augustanism’, in ibid., pp. 97–115, 110. Hereafter JA, with page references given in the text.
F.R. Leavis, ‘Sociology and Literature’, in ibid., pp. 195–203, 200. Hereafter S & L, with page references given in the text.
F.R. Leavis, ‘The Responsible Critic: Or the Function of Criticism at Any Time’, in Leavis, Valuation in Criticism and Other Essays, pp. 194–206, 195. Hereafter RC, with page references given in the text.
Roy Johnson, quoted in ibid., p.154. Falk gives the source as Printers Ink 75, 25 May 1911, pp. 10–11.
Jacques Lacan, The Seminars of Jacques Lacan Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953–1954, trans. John Forrester, ed. Jacques Alain Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) p. 183.
Ibid.
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977) p. 68.
Ibid., p. 85.
Ibid., P. 86.
Jacques Lacan, Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968/1994) p. 30.
F.R. Leavis, “Two Cultures? The Significance of Lord Snow, in Leavis, Nor Shall My Sword: Discourses on Pluralism, Compassion and Social Hope, pp. 41–74, 62. Hereafter TC, with page references given in the text.
Thomas Haskell, quoted in Seltzer, Bodies and Machines, p. 73. The quotation comes from Thomas Haskell, ‘Capitalism and the Origins of Humanitarian Sensibility, Part Two’, in The American Historical Review 90: 2, June 1985, pp. 534–63, 553. Compare Lacan, ‘The human action... is originally founded on the existence of the world of the symbol, namely on laws and contracts’, Lacan, The Seminars of Jacques Lacan Book 1: Freud’s Papers on Techniaue 1953–1954, p. 230.
Jack Lindsay, John Bunyan: Maker of Myths (London: Methuen, 1937). Leavis also takes issue, in this essay, with William Tindall’s John Bunyan: Mechanick Preacher (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1934).
F.R. Leavis, ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’, in F.R. Leavis, Anna Karenina and Other Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967/1973) pp. 33–48, 1. Hereafter PP with page references given in the text.
Notes 127–35 give quotations only from Lukács as there are numerous examples of the same features of Leavis’s work throughout my argument. The ‘self-contained immediacy [of] the work of art’, Georg Lukács ‘Art and Objective Truth’ quoted in Raman Selden (ed.) The Theory of Criticism: From Plato to the Present (London: Longman, 1988) pp. 59–66, 60. The quotation comes from Georg Lukács, ‘Art and Objective Truth’, Georg Lukács, Writer and Critic and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Arthur Kahn (London: Merlin Press, 1970) pp. 34–43, 37.
I he novel should aim at ‘sensuous representation’, Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Merlin Press, 1971) p. 79.
Georg Lukács, ‘The Novels of Willi Bredel’, in Lukács, Essays on Realism, pp. 23–32, 29.
F.R. Leavis, ‘Introductory’, in Leavis, Nor Shall My Sword: Discourses on Pluralism, Compassion and Social Hope,. pp. 11–37, 20.
Terence Hawkes, Meaning By Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1992) p. 71.
NO. F.K. Leavis, ‘Tragedy and the Medium’, in Leavis, The Common Pursuit, pp. 121–35, 130. Hereafter T & M, with page references given in the text.
Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991) p.18.
Ibid., p. 200.
F.R. Leavis, ‘Anna Karenina: Thought and Significance in a Great Creative Work’, in Anna Karenina and Other Essays, pp. 9–32,14.
Antony Easthope, Literary Into Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1991) p. 66.
F.R. Leavis, Thought, Words and Creativity: Art and Thought in Lawrence (London: Chatto & Windus, 1976) p. 34. Hereafter TW & C, with page references given in the text.
F.R. Leavis, ‘Henry James and the Function of Criticism’, in Leavis, The Common Pursuit, pp. 223–32, 225. Hereafter HJ & TFOC, with page references given in the text.
See F.R. Leavis, Pluralism, Compasion and Social Hope’, in Leavis, Nor Shall My Sword: Discourses on Pluralism, Compassion and Social Hope, pp. 163–98, 163.
T.W. Adorno, ‘The Schema of Mass Culture’, in Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, pp. 53–84, 79.
See, for example, Christopher Norris, Truth and the Ethics of Criticism, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994).
F.W. Bateson,’The Funchon of Criticism at the Present Time’, essays in Criticism 3:1,1953, pp. 1–27, 8, quoted by Leavis, RC, p. 199.
F.R. Leavis, ‘In Defence of Milton’, in Leavis, The Common Pursuit, pp. 33–43, 35.
F.R. Leavis, ‘Eliot’s “Axe To Grind” and the Nature of Criticism’, in F.R. Leavis, English Literature in Our Time and the University (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969) pp. 85–108, 95–6.
Jacques Derrida, ‘Semiology and Grammatology: Interview with Julia Kristeva’, in Positions, trans. Alan Bass (London: Athlone Press/University of Chicago Press, 1987) pp. 17–36,33.
Christopher Norris, ‘Derrida and Kant’, in Christopher Norris, What’s Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.1990) pp.194–207,195.
Nicholas Tredell claims that Leavis and Derrida have much in common because they are ‘anti-philosophers’ and, in doing so, he tends to collapse the differences between them. See Nicholas Tredell, The Critical Decade: Culture in Crisis (Manchester: Carcanet, 1993) pp. 1–8.
F.R. Leavis, ‘Mr. Eliot, Mr. Wyndham Lewis and Lawrence’, in Leavis, The Common Pursuit, pp. 240–47, 246. Hereafter EWL & L with page references given in the text.
F.R. Leavis, ‘Keynes, Spender and Currency Values’, in F.R. Leavis, A Selection from Scrutiny: Volume I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968) pp.185–96,195. Hereafter KS & CV with page references given in the text.
Sigmund Freud,’On Negatiori, in Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984/1991) pp. 437–43, 438. 163. Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, p. 286.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, ‘The Dream Work Does Not Think’, in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford/Cambridge MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989) pp. 19–55, 19.
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (Belfast: Ambassador Productions, 1992) p. 50.
Ibid., p. 51.
F.R. Leavis, ‘What’s Wrong with Criticism’, in F.R. Leavis, For Continuity (Cambridge: Minority Press, 1933) pp. 68–90, 75.
F.R. Leavis, ‘Mutually Necessary’ in F.R. Leavis, The Critic As AntiPhilosopher, ed. G. Singh (London: Chatto & Windus, 1982) pp. 186–208, 190. Hereafter MN with page references given in the text. It will be noted that this introduces a tactile element into the apprehension of a work which, since it is not related either to ‘seeing’ or ‘hearing’, further underlines the point about dissociation. This tactile element of reading is discussed in the next section.
See Graham Murdock, ‘Dilemmas of Radical Culture: Forms of Expression and Relations of Production’, in Francis Barker et al., 1936: The Sociology of Literature Volume 2, Practices of Literature and Politics (Colchester: University of Essex, 1979) pp. 21–45, 33–7.
Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (London: Hogarth, 1939) p.1.
‘Ordinary still photography’ was used for the first motion studies, then ’stereoscopic photography’ then ‘cine camera’. See Harold Pollard, Development in Management Thought (London: Heinemann, 1974) pp. 23–4.
A Foucauldian approach to some of the phenomena I have listed here would strengthen the argument. The relevant book would be Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977/1991) esp. the section entitled ‘Panopticism’, pp. 195–228.
Robert Bocock, Consumption (London: Routledge, 1993) p. 89.
Derrida’s analysis of the supplement may have some bearing here. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) pp. 141–64, esp. 145.
See, for example, Sigmund Freud, ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (Dora)’, in Sigmund Freud, Case Histories I: ‘Dora’ and ‘Little Hans’, trans. Alix and James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977) esp. pp. 45–8.
John Thompson, Social Theory, Mass Communication and Public Life’ in Antony Giddens et al., The Polity Reader in Cultural Theory (Cambridge/Oxford: Polity Press/Basil Blackwell, 1994) pp. 24–37, 29.
Ibid., p. 30.
Ibid.
Jacques Derrida, ‘The First Session’, in Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992) pp. 127–80, 133.
Ibid., p. 132.
Freud, ‘On Negation, p. 441.
Ibid., p. 439.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 440.
Ibid., p. 441.
Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in Freud, On Metapsychology, pp. 275–338, 307, 311.
F.R. Leavis, ‘Literary Studies: A Reply’, in Leavis, Valuation in Crttictsm and Other Essays, pp. 207–17, 217.
F.R. Leavis, ‘The Wild, Untutored Phoenix’, in Leavis, The Common Pursuit pp.231–9 237.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, ‘The Concept of Enlightenment’ in Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 3–42, 36.
Ibid., p. 22.
Ibid., p. 27.
Ibid., p. 35.
Ibid., p. 25.
Ibid., p. 26.
Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledue & Kegan Paul,1978/1990) pp. 278–93, 280–1.
Michael Bell, F.R. Leavis, (London: Routledge, 1988) p. 49.
F.R. Leavis, ‘Justifying One’s Valuation of Blake’, in Leavis, The Critic As Anti-Philosopher, pp. 1–23. Hereafter JOVB with page references given in the text.
F.R. Leavis, ‘Luddites? Or There Is Only One Culture’, in Leavis, Nor Shall My Sword: Discourses on Pluralism, Compassion and Social Hope, pp. 77–99, 92.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1996 Gary Day
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Day, G. (1996). Literature and Society. In: Re-Reading Leavis. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230377042_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230377042_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-39366-4
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-37704-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)