Nature et signification du jugement de valeur en critique littéraire: F.R. LeavisCette thèse se penche sur la nature et la signification du jugement de valeur en critique littéraire au XXe siècle et plus particulièrement sur l’œuvre de F.R. Leavis, critique littéraire britannique très influent durant la période moderniste. Leavis est un critique professionnel et un universitaire qui, en tant qu’enseignant et penseur, a fonctionné au sein du système universitaire. En tant que critique, il illustre certaines des pratiques les plus abouties de sa profession. Il a analysé le rôle de l’université et est souvent sorti du monde universitaire pour s’exprimer en public sur des problèmes plus vastes.Il apparaît comme une voix influente ; il a défendu un point de vue qui, selon lui, méritait de l’être. L’extrême sérieux avec lequel il accomplit sa tâche de critique de la littérature et du contexte plus large dans lequel s’inscrivent la littérature et la critique littéraire, a fait de lui une figure majeure de son temps.Dans le contexte de crise qui secouait le monde du début du XXe siècle, déchiré par la guerre, Leavis pensait que les universités devaient nécessairement devenir le vecteur du développement de l’intelligence, de l’éthique et des idéaux du monde d’après-guerre. D’après lui, c’est ce qui ferait rempart à l’érosion des valeurs et aux forces destructives. La littérature, la critique littéraire et les études d’anglais avaient, à son avis, un rôle déterminant à jouer si les universités voulaient assumer leur responsabilité en tant que dépositaires des valeurs humaines et des qualités intellectuelles les plus nobles, qu’elles sont censées nourrir.Leavis pensait aussi que tous les champs du savoir sont constamment en évolution. Il insistait sur le fait que l’éducation universitaire est une et indivisible et refusait absolument de considérer, comme c’était alors le cas, que les humanités et les sciences constituaient des pôles intellectuels opposés.Cette thèse examine l’état constamment changeant des valeurs dans différents domaines d’investigation. Un chapitre est consacré à un ensemble de normes—le rôle des universités, l’éducation de l’intelligence, le jugement et les évaluations, la lecture serrée des textes, « la civilisation de masse et la culture mineure »--qui sous-tendent la croyance de Leavis en une pensée « désintéressée » que les études littéraires contribueraient à nourrir. Par la suite, la thèse examine la manière dont se forment les jugements de valeur, en particulier dans les œuvres de Dryden, Frye, Eliot. / “Nature and significance of value-judgement in literary criticism: F. R. Leavis”The present thesis seeks to examine he nature and significance of value-judgement in literary criticism in the twentieth-century with special reference to F. R. Leavis, a widely influential English literary critic of the British Modernist phase. Leavis was a professional critic and an academic who, as a teacher and a thinker, functioned within the university system. As a critic, he exemplified some of the best practices of his profession. He analysed the role of the academy and often stepped out of the confines of the academic world to comment in the public arena on issues of larger import.He emerged as a major voice of a viewpoint, which, he believed, needed upholding. The intense seriousness, which he brought to bear upon his task as a critic of literature and of the larger context in which literature and literary criticism operated, singled him out as a major figure of his day.Leavis believed that the crisis of the early twentieth-century war-torn world necessitated that the universities become an instrument of development of intelligence, ethics, and ideals in the post-war world. That, for him, would act as bulwark against the erosion of values and the forces of destruction. The literature, literary criticism, and English studies, in his opinion, had a major role to play if universities were to fulfil their essential responsibility of being the repositories of humane values and finer intellectual abilities, which they were expected to nourish.Leavis believed that all fields of knowledge are in a constant state of research and development. He also emphasised the oneness of University education and vigorously opposed the then current notion of humanities and sciences as intellectual polar opposites.The present thesis examines the constantly changing state of values in several fields of enquiry. A chapter is devoted to a set of norms—the role of universities, the educated intelligence, judgement and evaluations, close textual reading, “mass civilization and minority culture,”––that underlie Leavis’s belief in “disinterested” thinking which literary studies help nourish. Subsequently in another chapter, how discriminations and value-judgements are formed is examined with references to the practices of Dryden, Frye, Eliot and several other voices.

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Thesis (M.Ed. 1978)--Department of Education, University of Adelaide, 1977.

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While focussing on the metaphor of scientificity in Leavis's and Macherey's writings, this dissertation addresses other questions central to criticism, cultural theory, and the philosophy of science. Whereas Leavis opposes scientificity, Macherey proposes "scientific criticism" as imperative to theoretical practice. Between the two critics, scientificity reveals its major metamorphoses. This study is divided into four major parts. Part One situates the concept of scientificity in the modern debate between critics and philosophers of science. I compare their problematization of scientificity to the way this notion has been represented in literary criticism. The debate blurs the boundary between scientific and literary knowledge, and brings the question of ideology in scientific discourse to the fore. Scientificity is thus bound with ideology as an epistemological practice. Part two focusses on Leavis's rejection of scientificity. In three chapters here I investigate the significance of Leavis's definition of "organic culture," "civilization," "science," and "criticism." These are all rooted in Arnold's cultural paradigm, which privileges a traditional order. Leavis's opposition to "theory," "science," and "philosophy" problematizes his principles of "precision," "analysis," and "standards." His controversies with CP. Snow's scientism and with Marxism reveal his concern with theory and scientific epistemology. His defence of "ambiguity," and "impossibility of definition" also makes his framework confront a theoretical impasse that is revealed by a desire to theorize criticism—Leavis's duty towards society— and a fear of theory and science, perceived as destructive. Part Three, comprising three chapter, considers Macherey's scientific criticism. His notions of the "structure of absence" and "symptomatic reading" are central to his theorization of criticism, science, and ideology. These are formulated through Freud's categories of dream analysis, Saussure's notion of difference, and Althusser's conception of ideology. For Macherey, scientific criticism negates ideology. But his emphasis on "absence" as constitutive of scientificity brings his epistemology to a theoretical impasse that resembles Leavis's. Macherey's anchoring of meaning in economic structures, in ideology, and in Marxism as "science," problematizes his scientific project because it abandons "absence." Part Four concludes the dissertation by investigating ways in which Leavis and Macherey illustrate the importance of an epistemological phenomenon in literary studies: criticism's struggle with scientificity. Whether opposed or defended, scientificity has helped criticism to emulate the hegemonic discourse of science and to combat rival critical strategies. However, to dispel "scientific" delusions, criticism must scrutinize its affiliation with ideology both in scientific method and in theory. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This study uses the framework of systemic functional grammar to conduct the stylistic investigation of extracts from two texts of literary criticism written by F.R. Leavis and Paul de Man. The aims of the study are: i) to identify the characteristic features of the type of text known as professional literary criticism, and interpret the ideological significance of the textual features thus identified; ii) to identify the characteristic features of two specific registers of literary criticism, liberal humanist criticism and deconstruction, and interpret the relationship between linguistic and ideological variation -as exemplified in the texts which are analysed- and power. The features which make systemic functional grammar a powerful tool in stylistic analysis are identified, and a review of the applications of systemic grammar to text analysis is presented. A model of the relationship between text and context is presented, and its key terms and their relationship (discourse, ideology, genre, register, language) are discussed. The analysis of extracts from literary critical texts is conducted according to the three main features of the context of situation as identified in systemic grammar: field (subject matter of the discourse), tenor (participants in the discourse) and mode (medium of the discourse). Finally, the study considers the implications and applications of the conclusions drawn, particularly those that relate to the academic institution within which literary critical texts are produced and read. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / D. Litt. et Phil. (Linguistics)

This thesis proposes a theory of literature's human relevance in literary terms, developing hints in the critical practice of twentieth century literary critic F.R. Leavis. It examines how literary texts can be humanly relevant in a manner that depends on their literary merit, and does so in three stages, interrogating: the way literary texts operate; the role literary language plays in thinking; and the interaction of literature and morality. The thesis has two, related, aims: to reconceptualise literature's relation to human living, and to offer a recharacterisation of Leavis's literary criticism, with the investigation of aspects of Leavis's practice forming part of the more fundamental enquiry regarding the nature of literature's human significance. In the first stage, the thesis argues that Leavis's critical practice in his works of the 1930s (his first major decade of critical output) provides fruitful ways for conceptualising the interaction between form and meaning in literature, with important consequences for present-day understandings of how literature functions and how it matters. It focuses on an untheorised (by him or others) achievement in Leavis's criticism, the introduction of the term 'attitude' into literary analysis and judgement, and argues that the term enables a different mode of attention to the question of how literature relates to the human world. The second stage first interrogates the role that language in general plays in understanding, constructing a hypothesis from arguments by philosophers R.G. Collingwood and Charles Taylor, and then turns to literary language, arguing that it enables a mode of relating to experience not otherwise possible, and forms a process of thinking, for reader and writer alike. The final stage focuses on arguments in aesthetics against literature's cognitive value, and in moral philosophy for its empathic and moral value. Building on earlier arguments about the operation of literary language and language's relation to thought, the thesis claims that literary language is humanly meaningful in a way that is both cognitively and morally significant. Throughout, the thesis argues for the inescapable link between well-written literature and the morally resonant, such that good literature forms what Taylor calls 'moral sources'. The crucial query is how literature functions, which will help us better to answer why it is humanly important. This thesis engages with literary criticism, philosophical aesthetics and moral philosophy, as well as offering close readings of literature itself.

This study uses the framework of systemic functional grammar to conduct the stylistic investigation of extracts from two texts of literary criticism written by F.R. Leavis and Paul de Man. The aims of the study are: i) to identify the characteristic features of the type of text known as professional literary criticism, and interpret the ideological significance of the textual features thus identified; ii) to identify the characteristic features of two specific registers of literary criticism, liberal humanist criticism and deconstruction, and interpret the relationship between linguistic and ideological variation -as exemplified in the texts which are analysed- and power. The features which make systemic functional grammar a powerful tool in stylistic analysis are identified, and a review of the applications of systemic grammar to text analysis is presented. A model of the relationship between text and context is presented, and its key terms and their relationship (discourse, ideology, genre, register, language) are discussed. The analysis of extracts from literary critical texts is conducted according to the three main features of the context of situation as identified in systemic grammar: field (subject matter of the discourse), tenor (participants in the discourse) and mode (medium of the discourse). Finally, the study considers the implications and applications of the conclusions drawn, particularly those that relate to the academic institution within which literary critical texts are produced and read. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / D. Litt. et Phil. (Linguistics)