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Books: The Two Cultures? The Significance Of CP Snow

Science vs humanities debate which still awaits resolution

The Two Cultures? The Significance Of CP Snow

by FR Leavis

(Cambridge
University Press, 10.99)

In his 1959 Rede lecture The Two Cultures And The Scientific Revolution, the writer CP Snow outlined what he described as "the dangerous gap between science and literature."

While science has the future "in its bones," he asserted, "literary intellectuals are the "natural luddites" who, in romanticising the past, are effectively denying the great social advantages of the industrial revolution.

This lecture instigated a general academic furore, much to the surprise of Snow, and it most famously ignited a vitriolic response from the literary critic FR Leavis who, in a rebarbative lecture in 1962, impugned Snow's credentials as both scientist and writer.

The style of language used by Leavis in The Two Cultures? The Significance Of CP Snow, combined with its highly personal nature, shocked the academic establishment.

The "negligible" Snow was no genius, Leavis claimed, and was "intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be." Snow might think of himself as a novelist, but "as a novelist he doesn't exist ... He can't be said to know what a novel is." The language continues mostly in this vein and therein lies the problem in approaching the debate, for Leavis's ire and venomous ripostes often preclude a measured response to his more serious points.

Stefan Collini's introduction and annotation of this new edition of the lecture not only helps to contextualise and rehabilitate it but also bring to the surface ideas that have relevance today as academics and educationalists try to address the increasing division between science and the humanities.

For Leavis the type of progress associated with Snow's technocratic science, alongside other developments such as an expanding university sector, was nothing other than an empty shell, progress devoid of any moral sense of the way life should proceed.

He saw this as particularly evident in Snow's eulogy of the industrial revolution, one that may have brought material advantages but also brought to the fore forms of mass culture that did little to enhance the quality or meaning of life.

Religion had failed as a guiding and unifying force and Leavis posed the question of how to discriminate and judge in the face of a rapidly changing civilisation.

His answer was to establish a radical pedagogic mission for English literature. Becoming the moral force to which we could turn, critically appraised and carefully selected literature would serve as a touchstone and guide for future generations through the onslaughts of modernity.

Inevitably, Leavis's evaluation of literature was often reflected his own liberal anxieties about industrialisation, "mass civilisation" and "minority culture" and he found it most forcibly expressed in his favoured author DH Lawrence, whom he promoted throughout his career.

Yet Leavis's legacy, which today underpins every university English department, should not be underestimated. It was the middle-class Leavis who challenged the belle-lettrism which typified the Oxbridge elite of his generation and who put English literature on the university curriculum as a subject worthy of rigorous and critical study.

As Collini states, whatever we think of Leavis's tactics, "his strategy is worth reflecting on, since it was a bold attempt to confront some of the enduring challenges and dilemmas of cultural criticism."

Yvonne Lysandrou

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