Page 43 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

CULTURALISM

in the face of later structuralisms as guiltless in their academicism as
they were self-consciously “guilty” in their choice of reading strategies.
For our current purpose, however, that of developing an
understanding of Leavisism’s powerful professional appeal to the
discipline of English, let us call attention to four especially salient
features of the Leavisite system: its organicist aesthetic, its historicism,
its radicalism and its nationalism. Consider each in turn. Leavis’s
aesthetic, which sought to derive the organic properties of “great”
literature from the organicism of human social life itself, enabled a
relatively precise definition and demarcation of the subject’s intellectual
and institutional boundaries. English literature, E.A.Freeman had
argued in 1887, could not become an examination subject because all
such “chatter about Shelley” is essentially a matter of personal taste. 38
But if criteria of literary value can be found to which students and
teachers can, or at least should, subscribe, and which have greater
validity than other criteria available to the untrained reader, then
students can indeed be examined for their ability to “discriminate”
and “criticize”. This, then, was Leavisism’s central achievement: to
ground an examinable pedagogy on an aesthetic which sharply
distinguished between literature, which is valuable, and fiction, which
is not.
It was Leavis’s own peculiar apocalyptic historicism, which had
sought to characterize the previous three hundred years of English
history in terms of the process of disintegration and decline consequent
upon industrialization, that came to provide the profession of English
with its very particular sense of moral purpose and intellectual mission.
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If “creative intelligence and corrective purpose” can indeed reverse
the cultural logic of industrialization, as Leavis envisaged, then English
literature can be transformed into a vital resource in the struggle to
free the minds of the young from the pernicious influence of both
popular fiction and commercial advertising. Thus the discipline emerges,
perhaps in unconscious echo of the Hegelian Geist (Spirit), as
simultaneously both knowledge of and solution to the historical trauma
of industrialization.
Leavis’s historicism actually led to a rejection of the immediately
cognate discipline of history (and also of sociology) as inadequately
concerned with problems of value. Hence his characteristically militant,
characteristically radical, understanding of the special nature of English
studies. Of course, Leavisism was never unambiguously radical in the

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