The morning Lull Report …

… courtesy of Dave Lull:



… The literature cure: Book Review: 'The Two Cultures?' by F.R. Leavis | 'Memoirs of a Leavisite' by David Ellis - WSJ.com.

In an essay collected in "The Common Pursuit" (1953), Leavis suggested that what the Romantic poets have in common is "something negative: the absence of anything to replace the very positive tradition . . . that had prevailed till the end of the eighteenth century." Blake, by contrast, had a religious spirit that expressed itself in "the confidence, unquestioning but un-hubristic, that the creative life in man will be justified in its positive refusal to be resigned." Gerard Manley Hopkins also pushed against the "Victorian-romantic addicts of beauty and transience" who "cherish the pang as a kind of religiose-poetic sanction for defeatism in the face of an alien actual world." So Leavis shuns defeatism, affirms the affirming, embraces the embrace. It's a consistent preference without exactly being a philosophy.

… Collective amnesia: There is No 'I' in Utopia.

The edifice of historical materialism—the philosophical system that justified Soviet misrule—didn't collapse of its own accord in 1989; it took decades of chiseling at its foundations by some of the 20th century's best writers, many of them former communists.

… Menippean satirist: the problem of Lewis the storyteller.



… Middlemarch times two: Hannah Rosefield on My Life in Middlemarch and Pamela Erens on My Life in Middlemarch.