"The very prevalence of what one might call the ‘outsider than thou’ attitude among intellectuals indicates that there is a form of competition for a perceived cultural good at work here. Whether it is the Cambridge don and influential critic F R. Leavis describing himself as an ‘outlaw’, or the old Etonian and widely published author and journalist George Orwell casting himself as a ‘literary pariah’, or the well-connected, well-heeled, well-reviewed novelist Virginia Woolf aspiring to found a ‘Society of Outsiders’ (or, more recently, the tenured professors-cum-media stars trying to lay claim to the prestige of the ‘exile’), the very repetitiveness of the claims tells us that what we are dealing with here is a symptom of the logic of being an intellectual, not an objective description of a social or cultural location. As a self-ascribed status, outsiderdom is an empowering identity, an attempt to use the available media to address the relevant publics without, so the claim goes, succumbing to the seductions and self-deceptions of insiderdom."
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Literary criticsUniversity of Cambridge alumniUniversity of Cambridge facultyEditorsPeople from Cambridge
Original Language: English
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Stefan Collini Absent Minds: Intellectuals In Britain, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) p. 414
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/F._R._Leavis
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F. R. Leavis
Frank Raymond Leavis CH (14 July 1895 – 14 April 1978) was a twentieth century English literary critic and academic, who worked primarily at Downing College, Cambridge UK.
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