Response to Gary Day's article 'Leavis, Post-structuralism and Value'

Laurence Raw Baskent University, Ankara, Turkey.


I enjoyed reading the article about F.R.Leavis and his relationship to post-structuralism, as a point of comparison between the academic worlds in Britain and elsewhere. I was fascinated to read about the argument that post-structuralism is fundamentally opposed to Leavisian theory, and how Leavis's idea of culture is fundamentally divorced from notions of the economic; that it is used as a buffer against economy. I'd like to relate this to the Turkish context, which is where I am based. Leavisian ideals still predominate in Turkish departments of English; not only as a means of validating the study of literature; but as a means of showing how criticism is a "scientific" subject - and therefore worth studying. There are two particular ideologies behind this; first, that Leavis has been perceived as a representative of what is "best" or "universal" about western culture. This is an Enlightenment idea, given a Turkish spin by the belief that, to be able to compete with Anglo-American universities, Turkish universities should learn "the basics" of western culture. Moreover, studying literature from a Leavisian viewpoint is believed to be character-forming, rendering students more humanistic, more open to new ideas. This might sound old-fashioned to a western reader; in Turkey, however, it is made relevant by its relationship to the beliefs of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, who believed that, in order to maintain the secular Islamist character of the state, universities had to westernize themselves. "Westernization" in this sense meant being exposed to the best of western culture - i.e. the most "universal" aspects of literature. If students underwent this process, they could have sufficient education to make a positive contribution to the development of the Turkish state; not only do they know English, but they have been exposed to the best of western literature, which they could subsequently teach themselves to their students, either in schools or universities. In other words, studying English Literature from a Leavisian perspective could help them to make a positive contribution to the Kemalist Republic. That ethos still prevails; and has influenced the ways in which post-structuralism has entered university curricula. Many institutions study Derrida alongside Leavis; they are both considered to be the best that western culture and theory can produce. However, it is incumbent on students to make distinctions between those aspects of Derridean theory that will contribute to the development of the state (i.e. modernize it) and those which might undermine its ethos. In other words, post-structuralism has been accommodated within a modernist ideal: people have to know about Derrida as an example of what is best about western theories, to make a contribution to the state.