ABSTRACT
The opposition between a superior high culture, whose literary branch preserves the best that has been thought and said, and the debased anthropologically defined ‘cultures’ that always threaten its existence runs like a red thread through English and American criticism. It is echoed in T.S. Eliot’s notion that a once organic and perfectly integrated Renaissance world had suffered a disastrous ‘dissociation of sensibility’ at the end of the seventeenth century and virtually repeated in F.R. Leavis’s conviction that that dissociation was the direct result of industrialization and of the emergence of what he called a ‘technologico-Benthamite civilization’ (Leavis 1967: 24). It is, in fact, this opposition between high culture and the various – and socially dominant – ways of life or cultures that threaten it that gave English studies its extraordinary self-confidence, determination, and even missionary overtones. The idea that high culture is essentially different from other forms of culture and that it has an inherently oppositional role to play with regard to other cultural expressions explains the missionary zeal and the moral urgency that we so often encounter in classic humanist criticism. It also explains its recurring sense of beleaguerment, the conviction – which is especially prominent in Leavis’s later work – that it is surrounded by hostile forces.
