Amis rejects Leavis’s canon but keeps his moral-judgment model

Evidence

To understand how and why they are linked in Amis’s essay, it is important to recognize that his repudiation of Leavis is only ever partial. Although he disagrees with the content of Leavis’s Great Tradition, he does so merely to counter it with his own aesthetic preferences instead—advancing writers such as Bellow, Nabokov, and Joyce for inclusion in the pantheon. He is not contesting the central claims made for great writing as the transhistorical product of unique genius carrying implied moral benefits. As Bradley and Tate observe, “While Amis’ somewhat Oedipal animus towards F. R. Leavis is ever-present in his criticism, his Olympian tone remains recognisably Leavisite: the literary critic’s job is still to judge, literary judgements are still moral judgements and the Great Tradition still exists, even if its centre of gravity has shifted westwards from England to the east coast of the USA.” — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 100

Categorization

• XREF: The move of attacking a specific canon while preserving the underlying moralizing framework is exactly the pattern the reader must detect when novels contest Islamophobia in form but reinforce it in structure — relevant to Hamid and Naqvi.
• DEFINE: Leavisite criticism defined as moral judgment via an elite readerly canon — a vocabulary term for reading contestation.
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that a writer can challenge the content of a tradition while fully inheriting its method is a precise analytic tool: partial repudiation leaves the load-bearing premise untouched.