The Common Pursuit

by F.R. Leavis

F. R. Leavis was the chief editor of Scrutiny, which between 1932 and 1953 had some claim on being the most influential literary journal in the English-speaking world. The Common Pursuit is a selection of Leavis's essays from Scrutiny, including his robust defence of Milton against T. S. Eliot, his deeply-felt engagement with Shakespeare, and his severe strictures on attempts to import sociology and political activism into the study of literature. The title of the book comes from a passage in Eliot's 'The Function of Criticism', in which the poet argues that the critic must engage in 'the common pursuit of true judgment'. For Leavis, this meant a strenuous insistence on discriminatory criticism - clear statements about what is good and morally mature and admirable, and equally clear condemnation of what is trivial. The Common Pursuit, with its controversial judgments of Bunyan and Auden, Swift and Forster, remains as challenging now as it did in 1952, and it is easy to see why Leavis - who was never offered a professorship by Cambridge University - held such sway over the study of English literature in his time.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Criticism

312 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.