Essay on Analysis of F.r Leavis' "The Great Tradition"

“If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.” (FCF 4).

My English Literature major has helped me to achieve an outstanding level of appreciation, enjoyment, and knowledge of both American and British Literature. As a high school AP English student, I struggled through great works like Hamlet and To the Lighthouse. My teacher’s daily lectures (there was no such thing as class discussion) taught me merely to interpret the works as critics had in the past. I did not enjoy the reading or writing process. As a freshman at Loras, I was enrolled in the Critical Writing: Poetry class. For the first time since grade school, my writing ability was praised and the sharing of my ideas was encouraged by an enthusiastic and nurturing professor. Despite the difficulty of poetry, I enjoyed reading it.

-The more a person reads, the more knowledge they gain and the more a person reads, the more we begin to see those similarities that exist between each piece of literature.

To bolster this position against contemporary historians, Gallagher used a specific methodology to both undermine other historians while simultaneously buttressing his own positions. Gallagher used a format that, at first, discussed what other historians have asserted in their respective works. Then, Gallagher made his own assertions discounting the positions of his scholarly contemporaries. In this fashion, Gallagher’s book is an exercise in rhetoric

Updike, John. “A&P”. In The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. Michael Meyer. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. 560-564. Print.

Life writing is a genre that’s more equivocal than other genres. It has its own codes and conventions which help convey its own key ideas and messages. The arrangement of the codes and conventions help the audience recognize the connection between other life writing texts. One of the these is how perspective is used to convey the authors aspects of the real incident. This convention links to the one of the codes, language, where the composer uses languages to create personal accounts of a person’s life. All authors use language to express their experience. This verbalization is what links all life writing texts together.

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one. ”(George R.R. Martin) This quote shows that when you read a book, you will relate it to your life and the book may have a solution that makes you live a longer and a better life. All authors will have a lesson or a value we can use or follow but the reader needs to decide if the values are valuable for them.

Written by Jeffrey Eaton, an Open Letters editor, this source is reliable because the magazine speciality is to critique many works of art and literature. Rather than merely summarizing the main events of the memoir, Eaton actually expresses his dislike about it by providing

As a historian, or anyone studying to be one, one must understand who is responsible for the historical text we study every day. Lucretius did not just survive time because it was passed down, but because one single man never gave up his search. Historians praise Poggio and his correspondents for the finding, restoring, and distribution of these important texts. To understand past historians, we are to understand the correspondence between these past historians. Examining these four letters and the text by Stephen Greenblatt, “The Swerve,” will help me understand what History is. What one piece of historic information conveyed clearly by these sources most deeply qualifies, limits, undermines or eve negates what you believe to be Greenblatt’s fundamental argument

Most of the author’s secondary sources are not current; this is both an asset and a hindrance. The antiquity of his secondary sources meant he

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan. "The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends", 2nd ed. Boston : Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1998. Copied under Permission from Access Copyright. Further reproduction, distribution or transmission is prohibited, except as otherwise permitted by law.

Throughout the passage the style of writing comes across as quite argumentative and analytical, yet the content and his ideas, at the time of writing, would have been quite outrageous. He offers to `... analyse modesty...' (p. 131) giving the impression that he will go about the whole business in something of a scientific way. However, the extremeness of his ideas makes one wonder

Since the argument for multiple authorships and time periods directly affect the historical and political setting, it is necessary to briefly review them now. As noted by Laser, Internal evidence

Many people believe that simply reading the literature is enough or that only certain people need while others can be exempt from the process. It is logic to note that by simply reading the works, information would be gathered. No additional information would be gained over time and by studying it,

“I was treading where academics cannot go because of the rigour of their discipline” (p. 10, l. 260-262). This combination of two such different ways to write allows her to bring back the voices of those who were left out of the historical texts.