The Critic as Anti-Philosopher (Leavis) - Softcover

Leavis, F. R.; Singh, G.

3.8

5 ratings by Goodreads

9781566631730: The Critic as Anti-Philosopher (Leavis)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566631734 ISBN 13: 9781566631730

Publisher: UNKNO, 1998

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"I believe in the critic’s business," Leavis remarks with some irony. His concerns here are with the problems and predicaments of contemporary civilization, the idea of the university as a creative center for an educated public, and the nature of thought as it occurs and operates in creative writing.

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Review:

The title of this collection, put together after Leavis's death, might suggest a philosophical tract, but nothing could be further from his style or analytical purpose. Leavis does discuss one "actual" philosopher, but "Memories of Wittgenstein" is a purely anecdotal turn. It explains well why the taciturn Austrian genius, a contemporary of Leavis at Cambridge University, was both exasperating and irresistible, but it does nothing to further the debate--implicitly engaged elsewhere--between the study of English and philosophy as disciplines. Other essays, dealing with particular aspects of the writings of Coleridge, James, Hopkins, Hardy, and Joyce, among others, are more typical of Leavis's work.

At his best here--such as his discussion of Joyce's "Work in Progress," the eventual Finnegans Wake--Leavis is challenging and persuasive. Elsewhere, though, his style teeters over the line between the merely elliptical and the long-winded. What T.S. Eliot said of Andrew Marvell might be said of Leavis: there's "a tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace." But the grace wears thin when there's controversy in the air, and Leavis spewed controversy like a critical smokestack throughout his long career. The Critic as Anti-Philosopher is no exception, containing some of Leavis's riotously unfashionable ideas about universities, intellectual life, and the "disaster" of democratic egalitarianism. --Richard Farr

From Library Journal:

In this trio, published in 1983, 1975, and 1947, respectively, the great British literary critic analyzes poetry from Milton and Pope to the Romantics on up to T.S. Eliot. LJ's reviewer commented that the "pieces illustrate Leavis's perception of himself as one who [tries] to communicate `with consummate delicacy...the creative work of a great writer' and who saw as his duty the Sisyphean labor of `reestablishing an educated reading public' " (LJ 2/1/83). More for the academic crowd.
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