An analysis of "Literature and society" by F R Leavis

 Literature and society by F R  Leavis

*Literature and Society is an essay by F.R.Leavis. During the Matrixing decade, Leavis was once invited to ‘Union of the London School of Economics and Politics’ where he addressed students on discourse on Literature and Society.

*Leavis showed great interest towards literature, tradition, education and society.

* He was inspired by writers and poet like T.S.Eliot, D.H.Lawrence William Blake, Bunyan and others. 

*As a result he has contributed many books like The Great Tradition, The Common Pursuit, New Bearings In English, Dickens the Novelist, Education and University etc.

* Quotes by Leavis : "Literature is the supreme means by which you renew your sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness”

* "Literature is the store house of the recorded values”.

*The above quotes assure us the significance of literature in one’s life and it’s need. Leavis always believed that literature should be closely related to criticism of life. 

In the essay he informs readers about the "‘duty of writer to identify himself with working class, the duty of the critic to evaluate works of literature in terms of the degree in which they seemed calculated to further (or otherwise) for proper and pre- destined outcome of the class struggle, and the duty of the literary historian to explain literary history as the reflection of changing economic and material realities"’.

#  Leavis views on D.H.Lawrence's portrayal of the society 

*Initially, Leavis focuses on working class and the literature that conjugates their life. Taking up the instance of D.H Lawrence, he opines that Lawrence had failed to reach bourgeois as he misrepresented reality. 

*What was wrong with D.H Lawrence was that "He ‘shared the life of a social class which has passed it’s prime".

# Leavis views  on Marxist’s theory

* "Marxist’s approach to literature seems to me unprofitable"  says F.R Leavisand he admits literature as a matter of isolated works of art and thinks that individuals with specific creative gifts produce such works. Marxist theory emphasizes on economic and material determinants of society.

#  Leavis views and criticism of T.S Eliot’s theory of Tradition

*(Leavis calls Eliot's "Tradition and individual talent" a failure because he rejected Romantic period society and it's culture, According to F.R. Leavis every society has its own uniqueness and culture,  and rejecting or ignoring a society and it's culture doesn't make any sense.  (Eliot ignored romantic period)

* "No one interested in literature who began to read and think immediately after the 1914 war- at a time, that is, co- incident with the early critical work of T. S Eliot- can fail to have taken stock, for conscious rejection, of the Romantic critical tradition( if it can be called that): the set of ideas and attitudes about literary creation coming down thought the nineteenth century".

*Leavis says that "The failure of Critical work of T.S.Eliot to have stock taken was ‘conscious rejection of the Romantic critical tradition’ ‘and directed against Romantic tradition’ Romantic period laid it’s die stress inspiration and the individual genius". 

*In order to understand the achievement of art, individual talent and original impulses must be taken into account. Eliot’s idea represents a new emphasis on the social nature of artistic achievement. 

*Instead of the word ‘social’ he uses ‘impersonal’.

* According to F R Leavis, "A literature, that is, must be thought of as essentially something more than an accumulation of separate works: it has an organic form, or constitutes an organic order, in relation to which the individual writer has his significance and his being. ‘Mind’ is the analogy ( if this is the right word) used".

* Eliot writes, ‘ He must be aware that the mind of Europe the mind of his own country, a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind is a mind which changes…’

*A masterpiece is produced when a gifted individual borns, he sets his inspiration and that leads to it’s creation.

* An individual writer must be aware of his work of the literature to which it belongs.

* Literature has an organic form and an organic order. 

*This approach to literature stresses on intectual and spiritual than Marxist theory.

* Quote by F R Leavis : "There is a human nature- that is how, form the present point of view , we may take the stress as falling ; a human nature , of which an understanding is of primary importance to students of society and politics"

* The study of literature is an intimate study of complexities, potentialities and essentials of condition of human nature. The difference between Marxist and Tradition theory is that - Tradition stresses on social aspect of creative achievement and yet allows individual aspect. 

* "Without individual talent there is no creation".

* In counter Leavis opines that "human life lives only in individuals: I might have said, the truth that it is only in individuals that society lives'’. 

*He concentrates on the point that ‘ you can’t contemplate the nature of literature without acquiring some inhibition in respect of that antithesis’. 

*"The actual poets of the Romantic period- Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats- differ widely among themselves. No general description worth offering will cover them ,What they have in common is that they belong to the same age ".

*The justification he (Leavis) gives to his statement by referring to the diversity among Romantic writers. They themselves do not exemplify any common Romanticism. The common feature that unites them is their age (Romantic period) and the negative: the absence of anything to replace a very positive tradition.

#F R Leavis views on Augustan age's society 

*Augustan age laid greater stress on social. It originated in the great changes in civilization that make the second part of the seventeenth century look so unlike the first, and its early phase may be studied in the works of John Dryden. 

*Their convention, standards and idiom of maturity has been proved in Tattler and Spectator.

* According to Leavis,  an age in which tradition itself gets established is clearly an age in which writer feels one at society. 

*"The characteristic movements and dictions of the eighteenth century, in verse as well as prose, convey a suggestion of social deportment and company manners".

*According to F R Leavis " Augustan Heyday and Queen Anne period were the period of confident and flourishing cultural health .But we should expect such and insistence on the social to have in time a discouraging effect on the deeper sources of originality, the creative springs in the individually experiencing mind".

# F R Leavis views on William Blake's writing 

* William Blake has applied his full consciousness which is genius and manifested technical achievement, the new use of words.

*"Full consciousness is genius, and manifests itself in technical achievement, the new use of words. In the seventeen eighties it is William Blake"

*F R Leavis quotes Blake who says "‘ It is I who see And fed. I see only what I see and feel what I feel. My experience is mine, and in its specific quality lies it’s significance"’.

* Leavis opines Blake uses English language and (which is) not his invention. The mind and sensibility that he uses to express are of the language.

*"The measure of social collaboration and support represented by the English language didn’t make Blake prosperously self – sufficient: he needed something more- something that he didn’t get".

* It is said that Blake did not receive a nurturing environment for his genius art. Blake serves to bring out the significance of Wordsworth’s kind of interest in rustic life.

*F R Leavis says that "The Tyger' is clearly a poem ( in site of the bluffed – out defeat in the third stanza). But again and again one comes on the thing that seems to be neither wholly private nor wholly a poem".

# F R Leavis's Idea of Popular and Sophisticated Culture

John Bunyan 

* According to F R Leavis, the best example for true real culture is Dryden’s contemporary, Bunyan.

* F R Leavis says that : "The masterpiece work of Bunyan, ‘The Pilgrims Progress’ is a humane masterpiece resulted because he belonged to the civilization of his time, and that meant, for a small- town ‘mechanick’, participating in a rich traditional culture"

* He belonged to the civilization of his time, a Mechanic participating in a rich traditional culture. An extract from By- End is discussed to uphold Bunyan’s popular culture. 

*Behind literature, there is a social culture and an art of living.

* Instance from Cecil Sharp’s Introduction to English Folk-Songs from the Southern Appalachians show that a civilization or the ‘way of life’s that was truly an art of social living. 

*The mountaineers were descended from settlers who had left the country in the eighteenth century. 

*Their speech is English, not American! They are leisurely, cheery people in their quiet way, in whom social instinct is very highly developed, they know their Bible intimately, are austere creed but majority were illiterate.

* The illiterate may nevertheless reach a high level of culture will surprise only those who imagine that education and cultivation are convertible terms.

#* From Shakespeare till Marvel we can feel the refined Sophisticated, European, and courtly urban culture in literature.

* Leavis puts up a comparison between Dryden and Halifax, where Halifax is easy, urbane, natural and master of spoken tone and movement. He holds the true spirits of Restoration yet seems similar to Bunyan in his raciness and idiomatic life.

* Dryden gets lively and presents polite idiomatic ease of that new organ of metropolitan culture which is not similar to Banyan’s. In Augustan verse, the verse of polite are seen in Pope and Addison’s work.

* According to F R Leavis The Modern literature shifted from the rustic life to mechanical after the death of Wordsworth.

* The one who concludes that contemporary would include the Marxking or Wellsian kind of relation to social, political and economic problems, but for literary tradition, history would have been lost and existence of popular culture would be questionable.

*Leavis advises the students of politics and society that ‘ literature will yield to the sociologist, or anyone else, what it has to give, only if it is approached as literature’.

* It is important to focus more on responding appropriately and appreciatively an artist’s use of language and his complexities of organization rather than explicit valuation. 

*A critic’s experience and understanding plays an essential role. The hints from the Gilbert Murray’s Rise of  Greek Epic, Dame Bertha Phillpott’s and Saga are referred.

*To conclude, Leavis says that ‘without the sensitizing familiarity with the subtleties of language, and the insight into the relations between abstract or generalising thought and the concrete of human experience, that the trained frequentation of literature alone can bring, the thinking that attends social and political studies will not have the edge and force it should’.

* Thus, Leavis makes an attempt to exhibit various approaches of literature that governed in different period and ages. We also find the major classes of literature. At the end, readers recognise the importance of literature to life and it’s influence on society.