{"id":1450,"date":"2020-07-25T06:57:00","date_gmt":"2020-07-25T05:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/?p=1450"},"modified":"2020-07-26T06:58:03","modified_gmt":"2020-07-26T05:58:03","slug":"f-r-leavis-and-cambridge-english","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/2020\/07\/25\/f-r-leavis-and-cambridge-english\/","title":{"rendered":"F.R. Leavis and Cambridge English"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Notes from The Preachers of Culture<\/em> by Margaret Mathieson (1975)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Chapter 9 – F.R. Leavis and Cambridge English<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

This chapter presents the influence of F.R. Leavis, I.A. Richards and the Cambridge School on English teaching in university and schools. Like the progressives, they distrusted industrialism and believed that society\u2019s quality of life was at stake. They particularly disparaged cinema, television and the cheap press. The teachers they required were to be \u201cwarriors\u201d who would cultivate a critical discrimination in children. For Leavis and Richards, critical skills were a form of morality and would save culture (and society).<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

  • Leavis tightened the link between English studies at university level and the school teacher\u2019s responsibility in the out\u00ad side world.<\/li>
  • Leavis gave English teachers the responsibility \u201cto resist<\/em>\u201d.<\/li>
  • He inspired graduates to become teachers and demanded men \u201cwho would fight<\/em>\u201d to teach critical discrimination as a form of continuous warfare against hostile forces.<\/li>
  • Mathieson: \u201cLeavis demanded men \u2018who would fight\u2019, and many graduates responded to the battle cry by entering schools to teach English as he had taught them. They adopted his aggressive stance, his military imagery and his combative tones; and as the cultural crisis was viewed as increasingly desperate, they became \u2018warriors\u2019 in the place of the \u2018preachers\u2019, \u2018missionaries\u2019 and \u2018ambas\u00adsadors\u2019.<\/em>\u201d <\/li>
  • The Cambridge School was influential on:
    • Denys Thompson<\/strong> – Reading and Discrimination (1943)<\/li>
    • Boris Ford<\/strong> – Young Readers, Young Writers (1960)<\/li>
    • G.H. Bantock<\/strong> – Education in an Industrial Society (1963)<\/li>
    • Frank Whitehead<\/strong> – The Disappearing Dias (1961)<\/li>
    • David Holbrook<\/strong> – English for Maturity (1965)<\/li><\/ul><\/li>
    • Quotes Denys Thompson<\/strong>: \u201cIn an ordinary school, all the time a literary education is striving to sharpen percipience and to provide standards, it is fighting a running engagement against the environment.<\/em>\u201d<\/li>
    • Mathieson: \u201cLeavis and his first disciples were deeply worried in the 1930s about what they saw as severe threats to quality of life at every level: com\u00admunism and fascism; the conditions of work and leisure in advanced industrial society; university indifference to their \u2018serious\u2019 approach to literature. Their response was to put their faith in the teacher\u2019s power to encourage the spirit of criticism. Their proposed solution to problems of \u2018false\u2019 living produced by commercial culture was the development of pupil\u2019s ability to respond individually to great litera\u00adture. Through the critical method they would learn, it was hoped, to reject the persuasive appeals of the media.<\/em>\u201d <\/li>
    • Mathieson briefly reviews history of English studies in universities: During 19th Century lectures on literature at college level were mainly given at Mechanics’ Institute (founded in 1850).
      • London University included it as a subject.<\/li>
      • English studies established in Scottish universities: Glasgow in 1862, Edinburgh in 1865, Aberdeen in 1893 and St Andrew’s in 1897 – English literature studied in classes of rhetoric and logic under a system much like the Dissenting Academies.<\/li>
      • English studies expanded in 1880s in elementary schools, girls\u2019 schools and Mechanics\u2019 Institutes – but not in public schools and universities.<\/li>
      • Sole study of English at Oxford and Cambridge until middle 19th Century was Anglo Saxon until it turned its interest to Middle English. Their attention was mainly philology and phonetics. Mathieson: \u201cGenerally trained in Germany and influenced by the German conviction that a speech which had lost its inflexions was in a state of decay, language scholars tended to resist the entry of English literature at university level; their tendency was to despise the language of Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth as degenerate.<\/em>\u201d<\/li>
      • Oxford tutors believed that the subject lacked rigorous mental discipline and would lower standards. Consequently at Oxford, English developed more or less as a study of philology with \u201cscientific coolness<\/em>\u201d supplying the discipline which reading of novels and poetry lacked.<\/li>
      • Situation at Cambridge:English, as an independent Tripos, consisted of two sections\u2014Modern and Medieval, and Old English. Students were allowed to combine one of these with a part of any other Tripos, few choosing to take both parts.<\/li>
      • In 1913 A.C. Benson<\/strong> proposed a School of English – with Arnold<\/strong> and Quiller-Couch<\/strong> they linked the notion of founding a School of English to the cultural health of the country.<\/li>
      • Before WW1, scholars were preparing the English Tripos of 1917. English Tripos became independent from the Modern Languages Board at Cambridge in 1926.<\/li>
      • Mathieson: \u201cWhen Leavis, drawing on the different critical powers of T. S. Eliot (The Sacred Wood, 1920), I. A. Richards (Practical Criticism, 1926) and W. Empson (Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1930), evolved what came to be recognisable as \u2018Cambridge English\u2019, he retained these earlier scholars\u2019 sense of mission, \u2018this sense of obligation\u2019 to all levels of education and society, as well as to the furtherance of knowledge, and \u2018faith in the saving effects of literature\u2019.<\/em>\u201d<\/li>
      • The Newbolt Report’s chapter on English at university conveys widespread confusion about the subject. Mathieson says that the reader of the report gets the impression that the Committee was almost overwhelmed by witnesses’ anxieties about consequencesr university studies if English courses were encouraged to be separate from the classics.<\/li>
      • The Newbolt Committee members were less enthusiastic in linking English with the classics than many of the witnesses. They were prepared to extend outward from English to Anglo-Saxon and pre-Chaucerian texts.<\/li>
      • In the section of the Report, The Study of Language in the Universities<\/em>, \u201cthe precarious state of English becomes even clearer<\/em>\u201d. Classicists disdained new subject from the outside and linguists held a strong position (linguists had been trained in Germany or were under the influence of German ideals and educational methods). The Tripos in English and German were run on parallel lines and based on courses persued in German universities.<\/li>
      • Mathieson: \u201cThe Report employs the term \u2018humane\u2019 throughout these dis\u00ad cussions. The Committee is keenly aware of its dilemma; concentra\u00ad tion upon the humane to the exclusion of the classics, history, philology, modern languages and philology, was to incur contempt for the \u2018soft option\u2019, while inclusion of other subjects could diminish the humanising potential of the central humane study.<\/em>\u201d<\/li>
      • Mathieson: \u201cThe Committee members suggest, finally, a compromise; they propose that candidates should, with the study of modern writers, be allowed to choose their comLatin. Thus, while accepting that English students should take a second course, they do not insist that it should be Anglo-Saxon. Their fears lest the English School becomes \u2018overloaded with primitive literature\u2019 are very clear; their concern is primarily with recom\u00admendation for the establishment of English Schools which would be\u00ad come \u2018true Schools of the Humanities\u2019. At every stage of the argu\u00adment, while concessions are made to the claims of other languages, convictions are expressed firmly about the educative power of English studies at the very highest academic level.<\/em>\u201d<\/li>
      • In London University after WW1 the stress was on the facts and history of Literature.<\/li>
      • At Oxford, English studies were primarily linguistic.<\/li>
      • At Cambridge it was unusual for students to study more than one English course.<\/li>
      • Mathieson: \u201cSup\u00adporters of English studies were preoccupied with the subject\u2019s central problems of the relative merits of facts about literature, or good taste in literature. Although facts could be taught, this would fall far short of the subject\u2019s highest humanising potential; although the training of taste was undeniably attractive, professors asked each other whether it could be done. Some supporters looked to the addition of other easily taught subjects to support the fragile new undertaking, while others fought for the establishment of a new, humane, central study as disciplined and ennobling as the classics had once been.<\/em>\u201d<\/li><\/ul><\/li>
      • Leavis on I.A. Richards<\/strong>\u2019 Principles of Literary Criticism<\/em>: \u201cThe benefit it conferred was liberation. To be released from the thought-frustrating spell of \u201cForm\u201d, \u201cpure sound value\u201d, prosody and the other time-honoured, quasi-critical futilities had a positively vitalising effect that can hardly be done justice to today.<\/em>\u201d<\/li>
      • Fusion of Freudian psychology, G.Moore<\/strong>‘s linguistic philosophy and I.A. Richards<\/strong>\u2019 critical method gave Cambridge\u2019s modern English School its unique \u201castringency and discipline<\/em>\u201d (Tillyard<\/strong>). Mathieson: \u201cThis absorption of other disciplines had the effect of immeasurably strengthening English studies and liber\u00adating them from their burdens of classics and philology.<\/em>\u201d <\/li>
      • I.A. Richards’ work central to Leavis’ critical approach and evident in the work of teachers and critics trained in the Cambridge tradition:
        • art and the rest of human activity are continuous and not contrasting (denial of the isolated aesthetic experience);<\/li>
        • his theory of \u201cimpulses\u201d (popular culture hindered personal balance and integration through its power to \u201cdis-organise<\/em>” through its continual stimulation of \u201cstock responses<\/em>\u201d).<\/li><\/ul><\/li>
        • Richards provided English studies with an approach that could compete with science and confound accusations of English being a \u201csoft option\u201d.<\/li>
        • Richards equated \u201cfine conduct of life<\/em>\u201d with \u201cfine ordering of responses<\/em>\u201d. Quotes Richards: \u201cBad taste and crude responses are not mere flaws in an otherwise admirable person. They are actually a root evil from which other defects follow. No life can be excellent in which the elementary responses are confused and disorganised.<\/em>\u201d<\/li>
        • Quotes Raymond Williams: \u201cIt is not too much to say that Principles of Literary Criticism . . . contained a programme of critical work for a generation \u2026 on this attitude to good and bad literature a whole subsequent critical and educational programme has been based.<\/em>\u201d<\/li>
        • Leavis believed that modern urban society was in a state of cultural disintegration (ugly environment, mechanised work, trivialising media). He believed that liberal education of the past bear no relationship with real life conduct. Convinced that English Literature should now replace the classics as a discipline characterised by a critical rigour as demanding as the sciences.<\/li>
        • Leavis believed that English Literature was central because it provided opportunities for sustaining tradition and providing continuity. Mathieson: \u201cHe hoped that the universities would take responsibility for the education of an intelligent, sensitive minority capable of appreciating the great works of the past and responding critically to contemporary literature, thereby sustaining and perpetuating a valuable tradition.<\/em>\u201d<\/li>
        • Quotes Leavis: \u201cIt trains, in a way no other discipline can, intelligence and sensitivity together, cultivating a sensitiveness and precision of response and a delicate integrity of intelligence that integrates as well as analyses and must have pertinacity as well as delicacy.<\/em>\u201c<\/li>
        • Richards’ and Leavis\u2019 definition of an act of discrimination was a finely-judged response to a writer’s use of language which involved the reader’s intelligence and feelings. It involved an activity they defined as moral. Language is used by a writer to recreate experience in such a way as to affect our reactions to it. In discriminating between the supremely accurate and sensitive or the banal or gross, the reader trains himself to respond more delicately to life itself.<\/li>
        • Leavis and Richards shared the progressives concerns about cultural disintegration. Quotes Leavis: \u201cThe social and cultural disintegration that has accompanied the development of the vast modern machine is destroying what should have been the control, and leaves a terrifying apparatus of propa\u00ad ganda ready to the hands of the more or less subtle, more or less conscious, more or less direct, emulators of Hitler and his ac\u00adcomplices. What is to forestall or check them? . . . without an intelligent, educated and morally responsible public, political pro\u00ad grammes can do nothing to arrest the process of disintegration\u2014 though they can do something to hasten it. . . . Scrutiny stands for co-operation in the work of rallying and strengthening such a public\u2026<\/em>\u201d<\/li>
        • Even up to 1960s hostility towards English as a \u201csoft option” subject persisted at universities.<\/li>
        • Leavis and students disapproved of the world of privilege – especially the Bloomsbury group. Mathieson: \u201cWhat Cambridge English saw as the Bloomsbury group\u2019s hedonistic, effete, sexually complicated life-style represented to them a deplorable, self- indulgent decadence.<\/em>\u201d<\/li>
        • Lionel Trilling<\/strong> – Dr Leavis and the Moral Tradition.<\/li>
        • Disappointment about unrealised hopes for the establishment of an English School at Cambridge conceived and structured as a centre of humane studies plus his neglect by the Faculty by the 1960s-70s deepened his views about urban society. Leavis: \u201cWhat we face in immediate view is a nightmare intensification of what Arnold feared.<\/em>\u201d<\/li>
        • Quotes Leavis: \u201c\u2026what has been said has obvious applications at the school level, and much might be done if it were permitted, if there were teachers educated to do it, and if the examination system were not allowed to get in the way\u2026 the training of sensibility \u2026 might profitably begin at an early age\u2026. Practical criticism of literature must be associated with training in awareness of the environment\u2014advertising, the cinema, the press, architecture, and so on, for, clearly, to the pervasive counter-influence of this environment the literary training of sensi\u00adbility in school is an inadequate reply.<\/em>\u201d<\/li>
        • Leavis and Denys Thompson<\/strong> – Culture and Environment<\/em> (1933). Shows hostility to modern urban scene. Mathieson: \u201cMore intensely and precisely than the progressives, who wanted creativity to strengthen the individual\u2019s personal life against threatening external pressures, Leavis and Thompson reacted against the debasement of language in modern society because of its in\u00ad evitable debasement of our emotions.<\/em>\u201d<\/li>
        • Quotes Leavis and Thompson: \u201cThose who in school are offered [perhaps] the beginnings of education in taste are exposed, out of school, to the competing exploitation of the cheapest emotional responses \u2026. We cannot, as we might in a healthy state of culture, leave the citizen to be formed unconsciously by his environment; if anything like a worthy idea of satisfactory living is to be saved, he must be trained to discriminate and to resist.<\/em>\u201d<\/li>
        • Leavis’ followers involved in teaching have resisted proposals for the \u201crichness” of working class culture to be included in the curriculum.<\/li>
        • Mathieson: \u201cG. H. Bantock and David Holbrook, both of whom have written fully about the curriculum of the less able, though they demand much more time spent upon affective subjects, define these by reference to high culture or the folk culture of our agricultural past. Their wish is to provoke pupils\u2019 critical response through their engagement with whatever music, art, drama and poetry can be related to their own lives, and through their own creative work.<\/em>\u201d<\/li>
        • Quotes Denys Thompson<\/strong>: \u201cEnglish is more than a subject. Its particular value (or \u201cuse\u201d) is that it can create and heighten that critical attitude to our civilisation which current affairs teaching should strive after. And thus, in formal education it can give unity and purpose to our syllabus \u2026. It is a common place that education must educate against the environment. And yet, after eighty years of compulsory education the environment seems to be winning. Even while at school the child is falling into the grip of the entertainment industry and by the time he is an adult the quality of his reading suggests that the environment has won.<\/em>\u201d<\/li>
        • Teachers are urged to strengthen their opposition to the products of the environment (tv and cinema).<\/li>
        • Quotes Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch<\/strong>: \u201cCan you not give them also in their short years at school, something to sustain their souls in the long Valley of Humilia\u00adtion?<\/em>\u201d<\/li>
        • Mathieson: \u201cFrom Matthew Arnold to David Holbrook the response to this kind of question, with its strong indictment of the modern in\u00addustrial environment, has been to recommend good teaching of great literature. In the period when religious imagery had lost its power, these teachers, once \u2018preachers\u2019, were redefined in military terms; \u2018the battle, desperate as the odds look, must not\u2014shall not\u2014be lost\u2026.<\/em>\u201d<\/li>
        • Mathieson on New Left and later critics: \u201cradical educators wishing to promote all children\u2019s independence, confidence and personal fulfil\u00adment, have attacked Leavisite English for its role in perpetuating social divisions and injustices along with the tripartite school system, the traditional curriculum and authoritarian teaching methods. Wish\u00ad ing to achieve their goals with a sense of purpose equally strong as Leavis\u2019s or David Holbrook\u2019s, the New Left propose several major shifts of emphasis\u2014from the school\u2019s values to the pupils\u2019, from the teacher\u2019s talk to the pupils\u2019, and from the subjects, high art in particular, to the experiences of the pupils\u2019 everyday lives.<\/em>\u201d<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
          \"\"<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

          Notes from The Preachers of Culture by Margaret Mathieson (1975) This chapter presents the influence of F.R. Leavis, I.A. Richards and the Cambridge School on English teaching in university and schools. Like the progressives, they distrusted industrialism and believed that society\u2019s quality of life was at stake. They particularly disparaged cinema, television and the cheap […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1369,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education","category-english-teaching"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1450"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1463,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1450\/revisions\/1463"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}