A Critical Education - F. R. Leavis and the Modern English Novel

自20世纪70年代该学科出现危机以来，英国文学研究一直受到越来越多的审查。对于约翰·吉洛里来说，文学学者目前面临的存在主义挑战已经构成了一场“合法性危机”，其特征是“文学研究的常年动荡，其方法和对象的不断革命，其专业身份的边缘”。自剑桥英语鼎盛时期以来的几十年里，人们最强烈地感受到了这种学科危机感。R.利维斯和弗朗西斯穆赫恩所说的“审查时刻”，吉洛里、约瑟夫·诺斯和特里·斯皮尔顿等人最近转向解开一段历史，这段历史将最终导致目前的事态。我的研究旨在通过提供第一个帐户的接收和传播的修订利维斯批评范式在新的大学英语学校的教学法成立于20世纪60年代，在当代英国小说家，包括伊恩麦克尤恩，石黑一雄和A。S.拜厄特：我的项目试图回答的问题是：如果利维斯的批评原则没有被20世纪70年代在其基础上出现的语境主义-历史主义的文学研究模式所推翻，利维斯纲领的要素实际上被新形式的文学教育学所默认，那么这种长期的连续性对我们目前的专业意义有什么影响？利维斯对文学价值的概念化如何促成了过去50年中一些最著名的英国小说家的自我造型？最后一点：揭示20世纪英语研究历史发展中隐藏的这些力量，如何帮助我们更好地解决当前英语学科的“危机”？像今天在英语系工作的许多学者一样，在20世纪中叶以后也是文学专业学生的英国小说家--如麦克尤恩、石黑一雄和拜厄特--是20世纪文学文本价值理论化的受益者，这种理论化是从理查兹和利维斯的批评原则和实践中发展出来的，而这将是世纪后几十年发生的“理论”爆炸的有利条件。从20世纪英语研究的新一轮批判性回顾中得到启示，我想抓住这个机会，仔细审视那些从事批判实践、抵制并在公共领域反驳这种实践的小说家的活动。

The study of English literature has been subject to increasing scrutiny since the perceived crisis in the discipline in the 1970s. For John Guillory, the existential challenges currently facing literary scholars have amounted to a 'crisis of legitimation', characterized by 'the perennial churn in literary study, the constant revolutionizing of its methods and objects, the agon of its professional identification' ix. Because this sense of disciplinary crisis has been most keenly felt in the decades since the heyday of Cambridge English, it is to that period, and specifically to the legacy of F. R. Leavis and the 'moment of Scrutiny,' as Francis Mulhern calls it, that Guillory, Joseph North and Terry Eagleton, among others, have recently turned to unravel a history that would culminate in the present state of affairs. My research seeks to extend these studies by offering the first account of the reception and diffusion of a revised Leavisian critical paradigm in the pedagogy of new university English schools founded in the 1960s and in the work of contemporary British novelists including Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro and A. S. Byatt.The questions my project seeks to answer are: if Leavisian critical principles were not overturned by the contextualist-historicist models of literary studies that supervened upon them in the 1970s, and elements of Leavis's program were in fact tacitly assimilated into new forms of literary pedagogy, what are the implications of such long-term continuity for our present sense(s) of profession? How may Leavisian conceptualizations of literary value have contributed to the self-styling of some of the highest-profile British novelists of the past fifty years? And finally: how can uncovering these concealed lines of force in the historical development of twentieth-century English studies help us better address the 'crisis' in the discipline at the present time?Like many scholars working in English departments today, British novelists who were also students of literature after mid-century -such as McEwan, Ishiguro and Byatt - are beneficiaries of a twentieth-century theorization of the value of the literary text that developed out of the critical principles and practices of Richards and Leavis, and that would be an enabling condition for the explosion of 'theory' that occurred in the latter decades of the century. Taking my cue from a new wave of critical retrospectives on twentieth-century English studies, I want to seize this moment to scrutinize the activity of novelists who engaged that critical practice, resisted and spoke back to it in the public sphere.