00119--What are the criteria of good literary criticism according to F.R. Leavis?

            F.R. Leavis does not adhere to any prescribed 'Rules' or the 'Principles' coming down from the ancients for judging the value of a literary work.  For him the 'Literary work' formulates its own criteria for its evaluation.  Its value must be sought in the work itself, in 'the words on the page'.  When this is done, balanced juedgement will automatically follow.  In this respect the reader's own literary and aesthetic sense has to play a great role.  The reader must be trained from the very beginning that he should not be led away by propaganda or mass media.  He must apply his own 'sensitive and scrupulous use of intelligence'.  Then 'even if he is wrong, he has forwarded the business of criticism - he has exposed himself as openly as possible to correction; for what criticism undertakes is the profitable discussion of literature".  F.R. Leavis also believes in intelligent discrimination among good, bad or ordinary authors and their works.

            It is not worthwhile evaluating every author as the historians does.  he recommends the evaluation of only those authors and their works  which qualify for 'the great tradition' in each genre.  This view is in conformity with the view of Longinus who recommends that only those works should be studied and evaluated which are 'truly beautiful and sublime' and 'which always please and please all'.  He recommends the close study and evaluation of the text for the work itself.  The critic must be self-reliant, free from all prejudices and biases in his approach to any individual author.  The American critics belonging to the so-called 'School of New Criticism' also follow Leavis's method of "Textual analysis and evaluation'.

00118--What is the function of criticism according to F.R. Leavis?

            Great literature is the store-house and preserves of the highest moral, cultural, ideological and aesthetic values and traditions of mankind.  The really good and serious literature of the present is a continuation and development of the really good and serious literature of the past.  Therefore really great literature combines the highest moral and cultural values of the past with those of the present and thus paves the way to the future.  Then comes the function of the critic.  The primary function of the critic is first to disengage the really good and great literature from the weaker one, and then to analyse the highest and best moral and cultural values contained in the great literature.  His function is to explain and disseminate those great qualities of literature to the masses.

            The critic has to see what is still alive of the literature of the past, and further to explain the modifications made in it by the present ideologies.  The critic  has to judge a work 'as in itself it really is.'  He has not to worry about outside norms, rules or theories of art.   He should be concerned with the work in front of him as complete in itself.  He has to explore, bring out and present the best thoughts contained in it without considering whether the artist has applied the established literary rules and theories or not.  He has not to take into consideration any extraneous information.  He has not to take into consideration or give weightage to any established reputation.  No matter if the established reputation of an author is disturbed.  The critic has to remain detached in evaluating a work of literatures infront of him.  Leavis says, "the business of the critic is to perceive for himself, to make the finest and sharpest relevant discriminations, and to state his findings as responsibly clearly and forcibly as possible".

00117--What was F.R. Leavis's Concept of Literature and its function?

            Literature for F.R. Leavis, is not merely an aesthetically written work of art designed to give pleasure to the reader.  It is not simply a document of language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.  According to Leavis, it is 'the storehouse of recorded values:  It is the writer's exploration of the cultural tradition of his age.  It is a record of all that the age habitually thinks, feels, and acts upon.  Literature keeps the healthy moral and cultural traditions alive.

            Great literature does something more too-it enriches a nation's cultural heritage and traditions in several ways.  Great literature age after age from the literary tradition of a nation.  It is in literature that the best of the nation's culture, both of the past and the present, is kept alive and communicated to the future.  It appeals to and elevates not only the smaller section of educated people but also refines the masses.    It exercises a pervasive influence upon feeling, thought, culture and standard of living.  In brief, literature is not just an aesthetic experience but a faithful record of the author's most profound interest in life.  Leavis says, "Aesthetic is a term the literacy critic would do well to deny himself.  Opposed to moral, it certainly doesn't generate light". 

            Leavis also says that literature is higher than history even in preserving the culture of the past.  History only maintains the record of the past; literature infuses life into it.  Literature re-lives the life and culture of the past for us.  Leavis calls it 'the exploratory-creative use of words upon experience.

00097--What is 'New Criticism'?

            The Expression 'new criticism' was first used in 1910 by Spingarn, a professor of the University of Columbia.  Different critics, whether of England or of America, evolved new metaphors, which went a long way in strengthening the movement of the new criticism.  T.S. Eliot's popular critical idiom is objective correlative, which is the external equivalent of the emotion of the poet.  Richards is known for his distinction between 'referential' and "emotive" meanings.

            The New Critics at the earlier phase were sharply divided into two groups - the realists and iconoclasts, and the aesthetic rebels.  The realists included Brooks, Bourne, Mencken, Lewis Mumfor, Max Eastmam etc.  The aesthetic rebels, were George Santayana, Lewis Gates, Haneker, and last but not the least J.E. Spingarn.  They were directly influenced by T.S. Elliot and Ezra Pound.

            The influence of Richards on the New Criticism is great.  But no less great is the influence of T.S. Eliot.  Eliot did not set much store by interpretation.  To him comparison, analysis, and elucidation were of supreme importance.  "Any book", says Eliot, "any essay, any note.....which produces a fact even of the lowest order about work of art is a better piece of work than nine-tenths of the most pretentious journalism".

            F.R. Lewis started a literary journal, named The Secretary, in which the scrutinisers proceeded by "a minute and brilliant examination - by a scrutiny-of actual passages".  "No treatment of poetry", he says in the introduction to Revaluation, is worth much that does not keep very close to the concrete: there lies the problem of method...."

            The new critics, with hardly any exception, confined themselves to the exploration of the artist's craftsmanship.  They wanted to rescue art from moralism and academic systems, conventions and abstract dogma.  "Systems become tyrannies overnight".  The New criticism is a challenge to Romanticism, which is an expression of personality and unbridled imagination.

            The New Criticism has been in vogue for the last four decades, and its influence has never been on the wane.