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eBook details
- Title: Meeting in Meaning: Philosophy and Theory in the Work of F.R. Leavis (Bibliography)
- Author : Modern Age
- Release Date : January 22, 2005
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 205 KB
Description
WILLIAM WILKINS'S BUILDINGS of Downing College, Cambridge, in his Attic style, are mainly of a warm Ketton stone, from Lincolnshire. Spare of ornament, and enclosing three sides of expansive lawn and broad gravelled pathways, they mark the whole design with "a mixture of vitality and asceticism." This apt phrase comes from an obituary in The Times of 18th April 1978, characterizing not Downing itself but one of its most remarkable former fellows: the literary teacher and critic, F.R. Leavis (1895-1978). Leavis was in many ways the academic glory of Downing in the twentieth century, although the severance of relations between them in 1964 hardly suggests this. The college provided an appropriate setting for his "lived, serious and intransigent project." (1) It was--like the university of which it forms part--the outward and visible presence of an ideal. (2) This paper tries to indicate the Leavisian gravitational field--or the field of association in which I want to "situate" him. I shall argue that his thought was profound and penetrating and very far indeed from exhibiting any kind of pre-theoretical innocence. I also suggest--the argument is related--that his work resists classification and that to call him a "moral formalist" or even (without qualification) a "liberal humanist" is to misunderstand him. I am not suggesting that "by a devout study of [his] symbolism a key can be found that will open to us a supreme ... wisdom" (his disparaging words of the Blake "industry"). (3) But some essential clues seem to me not to have been widely taken up. Testimony bearing on this comes from a surprising source--Raymond Williams: