The Critic as Anti-Philosopher

One of the century's great critics, now back in print. His concerns here are with the predicaments of contemporary civilization, the idea of the university as a creative center, and the nature of thought in creative writing. With an Introduction by Paul Dean.

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