20世紀英文学の批評を歴史的に位置づける試みを、F・R・リーヴィスを中心に行なった。特に、リーヴィスが自身の批評の土台を築くに際して高く評価した作家D・H・ロレンスについての批評に焦点を当てて、文献を検討してきた。この成果のひとつは、2019年5月25日、26日に開催された日本英文学会全国大会第91回大会で、司会兼講師として、「Literature is Ordinary?――20世紀の英文学と「ふつうの人びと」」と題したシンポジウムを組み、研究発表を行なったことである。「ふつうの人びと」というのは、私が2016年に翻訳出版したセリーナ・トッド著『ザ・ピープル』で描き出された、イギリスの労働者階級の人びとのことだが、教育およびモビリティの拡大と文学の受容との関係をシンポジウムでは考察した。そこで取り上げたのは、リーヴィスがどのように英文学を確立し、ロレンスの文学をどう読んだのかということだった。20世紀の半ば以降に、高まったモビリティと福祉国家の恩恵により高等教育を受けるようになった人びとは、ロレンスと社会的出自を共有していたから、ロレンスが小説に描いた世界を、社会的、政治的、経済的観点から共有できた。小説に描かれた世界を批評的に読むための指針を提供するのが文学批評であり、文学批評を教え、学び、実践する場が英文学教育だというのがリーヴィスの主張であった。リーヴィスを含む20世紀前半から半ばにかけての批評は実践批評あるいはニュー・クリティシズムと呼ばれ、非歴史的であるとしばしば言われてきたが、シンポジウムでの発表で試みたのは、リーヴィスの唱導した英文学教育を社会的な観点から再考し、その英文学と批評の実践がいかに歴史的なものであったかを明らかにすることだった。現在は、その成果を発展させるために、リーヴィスと英文学、ロレンスとの関係の再考に加え、レイモンド・ウィリアムズの批評実践へのリーヴィスの影響についての再検討を進めている。
In the academic year of 2019, I have attempted to place in historical terms twentieth-century British literary criticism in a wider context, centering upon criticism by F. R. Leavis. Especially, I have been reading Leavis's books and articles, focusing on his writing about D. H. Lawrence, who is the very center of the development of Leavis's literary criticism. One of the main achievements of this attempt is a symposium which I organized, as chair and lecturer, for the 91th National Conference of the English Society of Japan held on 25th and 26th May 2019. The title of the symposium was "Literature is Ordinary?――Twentieth-century English Literature and the 'Ordinary People.'" The "ordinary people" means the working-class people in the mid-twentieth century, who have attracted academic attention in recent years. One of the well-known researches on this subject is Selina Todd's The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class 1910-2010, which I translated and published in 2016. In the symposium, I propounded an account of the mobility of the working-class people in relation to the development of English Literature as an academic discipline. Thanks to the welfare-state policy and widened social mobility in the mid-century, the people came to enjoy higher education. Leavis emphasizes the importance of teaching literary criticism in higher education, on which he extensively wrote in many articles. Lawrence was born in a working-class family and described his experience of working-class life in his writings; working-class people shared such lived experience through reading Lawrence's books. In this respect, criticism of Lawrence's texts is, Leavis argues, a reflection on the experience of working-class life in social, political, and economic terms, upon which students in higher education should base their own studies about any academic subjects. The kind of literary criticism advocated by Leavis was often considered to be a-historical or even anti-historical. However, close analysis of Leavis's literary criticism on Lawrence leads us to recognize that his practice of literary criticism was premised firmly on his understanding of the social and historical context in the twentieth century. In order to develop what I argued in the symposium, I have been re-examining not only Leavis's criticism but literary and social criticism by Raymond Williams, who inherited a lot from Leavis and also focused on Lawrence in his significant writings.