Page 35 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

CULTURALISM

“Teutonic” philology: neither Raleigh nor Verall’s successor at
Cambridge, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, was slow to identify the
potentially sinister implications of too enthusiastic an interest in German
culture.
English Literature’s contribution to post-war reconstruction, the
1921 Newbolt Report on the teaching of English, proposed to establish
the study of English language and literature at the centre of a national
education in national consciousness. The Newbolt Committee’s vision
of English Literature as the cement of national unity found enthusiastic
echo at Cambridge (Quiller-Couch served as a member of the
Committee), but never really gained favour at Oxford, where an older,
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pluralist, dilettantism held sway. Thus it was Cambridge, rather
than Oxford, which would witness both the “revolution in English
studies”, and the appearance of “Leavisism”, a new literary-critical
doctrine which would, in turn, decisively shape the character of the
profession of English teaching in the years after the Second World
War. English Literature had justified itself as a discipline not in terms
of the particular class interests of the Arnoldian remnant, but rather
the contribution that sweetness and light might make to the construction
of a unitary Anglo-British national culture. It was thus inextricably
connected to the development of modern English nationalism, and to
that of its wider imperial extension, greater British imperial nationalism.
In retrospect, it becomes difficult to avoid the speculation that many
of those inspired both by Newbolt’s Association and by his discipline
must have eventually ended their lives in some corner of a foreign
field that would be forever “English”.

T.S.Eliot

If Arnold is the central 19th century figure in the development of the
culturalist tradition, then the equivalent status for the period since
the First World War, at least insofar as the general intellectual culture
is concerned as distinct from the more specialist rituals of academic
professionalism, is almost certainly that of the poet, T.S.Eliot. Eliot
was born and brought up in the United States, and became English
only by an act of conversion, which came to embrace not only British
naturalization but also High Tory politics, High Anglican religion
and High Royalist monarchism. A deeply learned man, his prose

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