The Common Pursuit

by F.R. Leavis

'"The Common pursuit of true judgement": that is how the critic should see his business and what it should be for him. His perceptions and judgements are his, or they are nothing; but, whether or not he has consciously addressed himself to cooperative labour, they are inevitably collaborative. Collaboration may take the form of disagreement, and one is grateful to the critic whom one has found worth disagreeing with.'

The tone, categorical, uncompromising, and deeply committed to the critic's task, is wholly and unmistakably Dr Leavis's, the most controversial critic of our time. In this series of essays he ranges from Shakespeare to Auden, from Bunyan to E.M. Forster. The essays on Shakespeare, Milton, Johnson, Swift and Pope are particularly important and what he has to say about E.M. Forster, T.S. Eliot, and D.H. Lawrence displays a challenging concern with modern letters.

Contents:
· Mr Eliot and Milton
· In Defence of Milton
· Gerard Manley Hopkins
· The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins
· The Irony of Swift
· 'The Dunciad'
· Johnson and Augustanism
· Johnson As Poet
· Tragedy and the 'Medium'
· Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero
· 'Measure for Measure'
· The Criticism of Shakespeare's Late Plays
· Literature and Society
· Sociology and Literature
· Bunyan Through Modern Eyes
· Literary Criticism and Philosophy
· Henry James and the Function of Criticism
· The Wild Untutored Phoenix
· Mr Eliot, Mr Wyndham Lewis and Lawrence
· The Logic of Christian Discrimination
· Keynes, Lawrence and Cambridge
· E.M. Forster
· Approaches to T.S. Eliot
· The Progress of Poesy

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Criticism

307 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1964

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

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm currently reading A.S. Byatt, and every time she writes something oddly inhibited and against her radical, imaginative nature, someone points at Leavis, as her teacher, by way of explanation. She at least had some self-awareness of the problems he caused her in her thinking:

"Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students: he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to or change it."
(Byatt, Possession, 1990)

I find early English Literature academic study wildly fascinating, and arguably they needed zealots like Leavis to really convince the powers that be that reading poetry and fiction was a legitimate form of study in itself. Liberal humanism is a kind of self-justifying approach, so of course he's writing with the didactic tone of a preacher. "'Aesthetic' is a term the literary critic would do well to deny himself." Being subjective is a moral failure as far as Leavis is concerned. I'd heard Leavis accused of quoting massive passages from his primary sources, and then never really analysing it, and he definitely does that. He would be flagged by plagiarism software every time. That's the problem with positioning yourself as objective, I suppose - you assume that others holding a different subjective understanding is an error, so why would you need to fully explain your viewpoint? If they're not stupid, they'll reach the same conclusion as you. God, I need to find out if he ever read Barthes.

I don't think it's worth resenting or mocking him, or fretting over his impact, because he's one of a small number of historic critics trying to found a tradition out of nothing; multiple chapters of this book are just discussing what the aim of criticism actually is. He's continually looking back to Enlightenment thinkers to try to find his predecessors, to prove English literature worthy. He really cares about what he's doing, about trying to legitimise a subject which barely existed, but it's such early practice, of course there's a lot lacking, of courde it's restricted and officious and cautious. He's so suspicious of literary Marxism, ie. the first literary theorists, trying to set literature in a full social context (and arguably do more to legitimise the subject than any evaluation of Samuel Johnson). In the chapter 'Literature and Society', based on an address to the SU of the London School of Economics and Politics, he writes probably the single funniest thing he ever said: "the Marxist approach to literature seems to me unprofitable".

[Huckfinn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to discover why Leavis is unread these days, and that I did - outdated donnish criticism, leavened with occasionally enjoyable bitchiness.