Page 42 - Decoding Culture

THE WAY WE WERE 35
standards that order the finer living of an age, the sense that this is
worth more than that, this rather than that is the direction in which
to go, that the centre is here rather than there. (ibid: 5)
They are the guardians of culture and, in the twentieth century,
this culture is in crisis. It is in crisis because of larger social
changes which, first in America but increasingly in other coun­
tries, have spread mass production and standardization across
wide reaches of modern society, undermining what elsewhere
Leavis and Thompson (1933) write of as the 'organic community'.
In newspapers, in broadcasting, in advertizing, in film, we
encounter 'that deliberate exploitation of the cheap response which
characterises our civilisation' (Leavis, 1930: 1 ) . Though there may
1
be room for hope that we can climb out of what the contemporary
critic I. A. Richards identified as a 'cultural trough', it is clear that
'
for Leavis the challenge is considerable: [ tlhe prospects of culture,
then, are very dark' (ibid: 30).
What is to be done? Q. D. Leavis (1932: 211) suggests the thrust
of a response. 'It is only by acquiring access to good poetry, great
drama, and the best novels, the forms of art that, since they
achieve their effects through language, most readily improve the
quality of living, that the atmosphere in which we live may be oxy­
genated.' If such access can be enabled, if the reading public, with
whom she is particularly concerned in this study, can be weaned
away from popular fiction and into a proper appreciation of the
'best literature', perhaps the cultural crisis can be overcome. Not
surprisingly, then, Leavisism is much exercised by education and
by the attempt to train critical awareness. Both in seeking to influ­
ence educational practice by providing (in Leavis and Thompson's
Culture and Environment) a handbook for the use of teachers want­
ing to promote a critical response to contemporary media
materials, and in the detailed textual analysis that came to charac­
terize the Leavisite critical 'method', they sought to sustain

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