Author, Author!

I was first introduced to the study of English literature in a British high school in the 1960s. At that time, English teachers around much of the world were instilling the mysteries of literary criticism in impressionable young minds by means of the writings of two men, I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis, who over the previous 30 or so years had become the effective high priests of English studies. Of the two, by far the more assertive was Leavis. By the early 1960s he had recently emerged, in his own view the victor, from the notorious “Two Cultures” controversy. In defence of a national culture he saw as being under threat from the life-denying values of an increasingly “technologico-Benthamite” society, he had locked horns—although only he was really fighting—with the scientist and novelist C.P. Snow. These were stirring times, and would continue so for some years: not for nothing was one of Leavis’s final books entitled Nor Shall My Sword: Discourses on Pluralism...