The Assault on French Literature [antikvár]

PREFACE IN this book I offer some critical observations and constructive suggestions on the presentation of what is still, for the majority of us in Britain, the most attractive of foreign literatures. The title chosen for the collection would lose little of its significance, at least for the author, if limitations of headline space allowed him to use a rubric of this kind: 'Thoughts on the making of a modern discipline with examples and reservations drawn from the régime and practices of previous decades.' My descriptions and disclosures of what went wrong in the past will have, it is hoped, an encouraging effect. They demonstrate by contrast what improvements in the organization of studies have been made, especially during the years of expansion so well turned to account since the last world war. Ofthe many grounds for rejoicing that one recognizes in the present phase of educational discussion, none is more reassuring than the willingness ofthe authorities to accept the principle of change and adaptation rather than to resist aU initiative with the obduracy or evasiveness practised in some quarters even as recently as thirty years ago. Yet when one thinks of the condition of humane studies and the risk they run of being degraded to the status of poor relations of the sciences, a source of disquietude persists. What improvements have occurred in them seem to have been due less to intrinsic developments within the disciplines themselves than to the results of changes happening in the world outside, vibrations from which impinge on the curriculum through impersonal channels, altering its contents, as it were, par la ix