F.R. Leavis - 'Mass Civilization and Minority Culture'

Leavis, F.R. (1930) ‘Mass Civilization and Minority Culture’ in Storey (2007) Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: a Reader. London:Pearson.

When reading the first paragraph of Leavis’ article, he expresses many of the same values and theories about culture as Williams and Arnold, he mentions the elitist system of culture, and also touches up on how “generations find it hard to adjust themselves to each other”. He blames the shift in culture due to lack of tradition.

Throughout the article Leavis expresses his desire to keep the traditions of the past alive. He points out that culture is reserved to “the minorities”, these are the Elitists who are educated enough to understand literature. This restricts the working class from gaining access to culture as education was limited.

The raise in mass media at the time made Leavis believe society was in a “culture crisis”. He blames America for this, and how as a society we have become ‘Americanised’. This is due to the fact that the society and culture changes much more rapidly in American, and the rest of the Western world follows suit, therefore creating an Americanised culture in Britain today. This was a problem for Leavis as he believed that living in an Americanised society would result in the lack of British culture, and also create a singular universal culture for everybody, rather than separate individual values and traditions.

He discusses ‘Hollywood Cinema’ a lot in this article and blames it for the “levelling down” of society. Films were mass produced and contained no intellectual process to enjoy, unlike reading a novel for example.  He accuses the American film industry of evoking “cheap responses” from their audience. As Hollywood films imitate real life, it has a certain amount of emotional appeal to certain audience members.

According to Leavis the mass production of media has made ones pursuit of becoming ‘cultured’ much harder to obtain. He speaks about the plight of culture and how the lines and boundaries of high culture and low culture have been blurred; therefore class is no longer an issue in the debate of culture.