F. R. Leavis, or the Function of Criticism under Specialist Modernity

F. R. Leavis, or the Function of Criticism under Specialist Modernity

  Leavis"s criticism is characterized with its present-centred project of modernity, which this article proposes culminates in his essay "The Responsible Critic: or The Function of Criticism at Any Time." Through the Arnoldian essay title, just as Arnold himself and Eliot did respectively in their own ages, Leavis suggests other possibilities against the main stream of contemporary modernity, which he specifies as the triumphant modernity of cultural disintegration, mechanical organization and constant rapid change. Likewise, he grasps the age in terms of sweeping dissolution and drastic discontinuity: the contemporary stage of modernity for him is marked by a collapse of standards, which he sums up into one of his idiosyncratic phrases, "technologico-Benthamism." What Leavis the engaged critic is most concerned for in this situation is the dissolution of the reading public as a consequence of centrifugal modernity"s overshadowing demand for compartmentalised knowledge. His critical project, in this age of fragmentising overspecialization, begins with his penetrating observation of the reality of overwhelming disintegration as it is. Now in the wake of Kant, that is, the consciousness of cultural plight awakens Leavis to the fact that the university is the only agent practicable for the establishment of effective educated public under specialized modernity. In the copresence of the different self-stultifying specialist disciplines and fields of study at the university, he ultimately designates literary study or criticism as a centre of liaison: the literary-critical, concerned with training at once sensibility and intelligence with its interdisciplinary approaches in nature, assumes the status of non-specialist special discipline in his critical project of modernity. Particularly in the essay of our primary concern, for this reason, Leavis runs counter to compartmentalising modernity which has never ceased its ferocious attempt to set up literary criticism as another self-contained specialist discipline scholarly industry and academic method.