Lonergan and Poetry II

Extract

So far I have attempted to explain from a Lonerganian perspective how literary art works and inevitably this has led to a consideration of how we, as readers, respond to literary art. To assess the capacity of Lonergan’s transcendental method to illumine the nature of critical response we could do no better, I think, than compare the structure of that method with the recorded practice of F. R. Leavis, the English critic who has arguably contributed more than anyone this century to our understanding of the nature of critical engagement with literature. Both Lonergan and Leavis emphasize the need to train and cultivate the feelings if moral maturity is to be achieved and, as a literary critic, Leavis is especially insistent on the ability of literature to effect this and, indeed, would partly justify the place of English in the university on these grounds (see ‘Education and the University’ in Scrutiny, Vol. 9). But it is on Leavis’s analysis of the structure of critical response to literature that I should like to focus. It may seem paradoxical to compare Leavis to a philosopher since he was at some pains to decline the invitation of the philosopher Rene Wellek to state ‘more explicitly’ and ‘more abstractly’ the assumptions underlying his practice and was especially resistant to the philosophical notion of a norm by which poets are measured. It has been suggested, however, that Leavis was less philosophically innocent than he protests to be and that it was the dominant logical-scientific paradigm of philosophy at that time (1937) to which he was so resistant. In any case, in his reply to Wellek and in several other places in Scrutiny he sets out the manner in which he comes to appreciate a poem and reach a critical evaluation. The importance of such recorded. practice to Lonergan’s method is that Lonergan claims to be thoroughly empirical in approach, that his mapping out of method is simply the objectification of the processes that occur spontaneously in actual practice (see Method, p. 4).