Inspired by
Many years ago, I was listening one morning to my Rocky Horror Show tape in the kitchen of the student house I lived in at the time. One of my housemates came into the romm. I said to him, “Richard, I answered that phone call from your father last night and noticed he had quite a strong accent. Where’s he from?” Richard said, “He’s from Transylvania, actually.” Guess what song was playing on the tape at that moment?
As I was taking this in, the phone rang and I went to answer it. It was Dervla Murphy, the travel writer, who I was doing some business with at the time. She was apologising that she couldn’t make it to the next of our scheduled meetings because she was travelling to do research for her next book, Transylvania and Beyond.
I’ve never been to Transylvania myself though I’ve been to both Hungary and Romania a few times.
Have you read Culture and Anarchy, which is the father of the book, so to speak? Culture is the best that has been thought or said and is sweetness and light, but I don’t think there are any concrete examples (but Keats would be in there).
I suspect it ends up as a circular argument – the GT/canon is great because we gatekeepers (children of the light) say so, because we have been trained in the GT/canon and the GT/canon enlightens people into becoming gatekeepers.
There’s a really interesting book by Chris Baldick on Leavis and the origins of English Studies (think the Raj to educate Johnny Foreigner/soothe the savage beast and WEA for working class wives so they can soothe the etc), which makes connections between Leavis and left of centre thinking. His notion of popular culture is not that far from the Frankfurt School, although his worry is about what the masses will do to us and Frankfurt’s is what is being one to the masses.