Knowledge for the 21st Century: Revisiting the Snow/Leavis Controversy Lena S. Petrović

Abstract

The paper is a response to an important observation Professor Darko Suvin made in 1999, namely, that stances must ultimately depend on circumstances, and in particular to his warning that the circumstances marking the turn of the century demand a revision of our assumptions of what the knowledge that truly matters is. Now, as the circumstances shaping our social and political existence deteriorate, the concern about the diminishing role of humanist education, as opposed to scientific or specialized training is voiced with increasing urgency and apprehension. Part of the changing paradigm within cultural and literary studies is the will to re-assess the position of F. R. Leavis. Thus Leavis’s response to C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures, for several decades merely an object lesson in bad academic manners, is now being revisited as an integral part of his life-long ’mental fight’ for the conception of humanist studies as the irreplacable source of criteria that would counter the general tendency of what he called the technologico-Benthamite culture to misuse science in ways that cheapen, impoverish and dehumanize life. The Leavis/Snow controversy, as well as the contemporary debate concerning the humanities, I will argue in the concluding part of my paper, can be read as the latest version of the paradigm clash dramatically transposed in the stories of two archetypal knowers – Faust and Prospero.