Lionel Trilling  

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'''Lionel Mordecai Trilling''' (July 4, 1905 – November 5, 1975) was an [[American literary critic]], author, and teacher. With wife [[Diana Trilling]], he was a member of [[the New York Intellectuals]] and contributor to the ''[[Partisan Review]]''. Although he did not establish a school of literary criticism, he is one of the leading U.S. critics of the twentieth century who traced the contemporary cultural, social, and political implications of literature. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he has been a subject of continued interest. '''Lionel Mordecai Trilling''' (July 4, 1905 – November 5, 1975) was an [[American literary critic]], author, and teacher. With wife [[Diana Trilling]], he was a member of [[the New York Intellectuals]] and contributor to the ''[[Partisan Review]]''. Although he did not establish a school of literary criticism, he is one of the leading U.S. critics of the twentieth century who traced the contemporary cultural, social, and political implications of literature. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he has been a subject of continued interest.
-==Academic life==+He is known for such essay collections as ''[[Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning]]''.
-Lionel Trilling was born in [[Queens, New York]], the son of Fannie (née Cohen), who was from London, and David Trilling, a tailor from Bialystok in Poland.<ref>[http://books.google.ca/books?id=mBahR28hEjAC&pg=PR31&dq=Lionel+Mordechai+Trilling&hl=en&redir_esc=y]</ref> His family was Jewish. In 1921, he graduated from [[DeWitt Clinton High School]], and, at age sixteen, entered [[Columbia University]], thus beginning a lifelong association with the university. In 1925, he graduated from Columbia College, and, in 1926, earned a [[Master of Arts (postgraduate)|Master of Arts]] degree at the university. He then taught at the [[University of Wisconsin–Madison]] and at [[Hunter College]].+
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-In 1932, he returned to Columbia to pursue his doctoral degree in English literature and to teach literature. He earned his doctorate in 1938 with a dissertation about [[Matthew Arnold]] that he later published. He was promoted to assistant professor the following—Columbia's first tenured Jewish professor in the English department; he was promoted to full professor in 1948.+
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-Lionel Trilling became the George Edward Woodberry Professor of Literature and Criticism in 1965. He was a popular instructor and for thirty years taught Columbia's Colloquium on Important Books, a course about the relationship between literature and cultural history, with [[Jacques Barzun]]. His students included [[Lucien Carr]], [[Jack Kerouac]], [[Allen Ginsberg]], [[John Hollander]], [[Cynthia Ozick]], [[Carolyn Gold Heilbrun]], [[Louis Menand]], Robert Leonard Moore <ref>Author of ''Compendiary'' (2 v., 2007-2009)</ref> and [[Norman Podhoretz]].+
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-Trilling was the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at [[Harvard University]] for academic year 1969-70. In 1972, he was selected by the [[National Endowment for the Humanities]] to deliver the first [[Jefferson Lecture]] in the Humanities, described as "the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities."<ref name="jefflect">[http://www.neh.gov/whoweare/jefflect.html Jefferson Lecturers] at NEH Website (Retrieved January 22, 2009).</ref> Trilling was a senior fellow of the Kenyon School of English and subsequently a senior fellow of the [[School of Letters (Indiana)|Indiana School of Letters]].+
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-==''Partisan Review'' and the "New York Intellectuals"==+
-In 1937, Trilling joined the recently revived magazine ''[[Partisan Review]]'', a [[Marxist]], but anti-[[Stalinist]], journal founded by [[William Phillips (editor)|William Philips]] and [[Philip Rahv]] in 1934.<ref>Longstaff, S. A. “New York Intellectuals”, ''Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism''.</ref>+
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-The ''Partisan Review'' was associated with the New York Intellectuals — Trilling, his wife [[Diana Trilling]], [[Lionel Abel]], [[Hannah Arendt]], [[William Barrett (philosopher)|William Barrett]], [[Daniel Bell]], [[Saul Bellow]], [[Richard Chase (folklorist)|Richard Thomas Chase]], [[F. W. Dupee]], [[Leslie Fiedler]], [[Paul Goodman (writer)|Paul Goodman]], [[Clement Greenberg]], [[Elizabeth Hardwick (writer)|Elizabeth Hardwick]], [[Irving Howe]], [[Alfred Kazin]], [[Hilton Kramer]], [[Steven Marcus]], [[Mary McCarthy (author)|Mary McCarthy]], [[Dwight Macdonald]], William Phillips, [[Norman Podhoretz]], [[Harold Rosenberg]], [[Isaac Rosenfeld]], [[Delmore Schwartz]], and [[Susan Sontag]] — who emphasized the influence of history and culture upon authors and literature. The New York Intellectuals distanced themselves from the [[New Critics]].+
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-In his preface to the essays collection, ''[[Beyond Culture]]'' (1965), Trilling defended the New York Intellectuals: "As a group, it is busy and vivacious about ideas, and, even more, about attitudes. Its assiduity constitutes an authority. The structure of our society is such that a class of this kind is bound by organic filaments to groups less culturally fluent that are susceptible to its influence."+
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-==Critical and literary works==+
-Trilling wrote one novel, ''The Middle of the Journey'' (1947), about an affluent Communist couple's encounter with a [[Communist]] defector. (Trilling later acknowledged that the character was inspired by his Columbia College compatriot and contemporary [[Whittaker Chambers]]<ref>{{Cite book+
- | last = Chambers+
- | first = Whittaker+
- | title = Cold Friday+
- | publisher = Random House+
- | year = 1964+
- | page = 128+
- | isbn = 0-394-41969-3}}</ref><ref>+
- {{cite news+
- | last = Trilling+
- | first = Lionel+
- | title = Whittaker Chambers and 'The Middle of the Journey'+
- | publisher = ''New York Review of Books''+
- | date = April 17, 1975+
- | url = http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1975/apr/17/whittaker-chambers-and-the-middle-of-the-journey/+
- | accessdate = October 9, 2010}}</ref>). His short stories include "The Other Margaret." Otherwise, he wrote essays and reviews, in which he reflected on literature's ability to challenge the morality and conventions of the culture. Critic [[David Daiches]] said of Trilling, "Mr. Trilling likes to move out and consider the implications, the relevance for culture, for civilization, for the thinking man today, of each particular literary phenomenon which he contemplates, and this expansion of the context gives him both his moments of his greatest perceptions, and his moments of disconcerting generalization."+
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-Trilling published two complex studies of authors [[Matthew Arnold]] (1939) and [[E. M. Forster]] (1943), both written in response to a concern with "the tradition of humanistic thought and the intellectual middle class which believes it continues this tradition."<ref>Trilling, Lionel, et al., ''The Situation in American Writing: A Symposium Partisan Review'', Volume 6 5 (1939).</ref> His first collection of essays, ''The Liberal Imagination'', was published in 1950, followed by the collections ''The Opposing Self'' (1955), focusing on the conflict between self-definition and the influence of culture, ''Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture'' (1955), ''A Gathering of Fugitives'' (1956), and ''[[Beyond Culture]]'' (1965), a collection of essays concerning modern literary and cultural attitudes toward selfhood. In ''[[Sincerity and Authenticity]]'' (1972), he explores the ideas of the moral self in post-[[Age of Enlightenment|Enlightenment]] Western civilization. He wrote the introduction to ''The Selected Letters of John Keats'' (1951), in which he defended [[Keats]]’s notion of [[negative capability]], as well as the introduction, “[[George Orwell]] and the Politics of Truth," to the 1952 reissue of George Orwell’s ''[[Homage to Catalonia]]''.+
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-In 2008, [[Columbia University Press]] published an unfinished novel that Trilling had abandoned in the late 1940s. Scholar Geraldine Murphy discovered the half-finished novel among Trilling's papers archived at [[Columbia University]].<ref name="powells">[http://www.powells.com/biblio/9780231144506 "Synopses & Reviews": ''The Journey Abandoned''] [http://www.powells.com Powell's Books], 2008. Retrieved 2008-05-27.</ref> Trilling's novel, ''The Journey Abandoned: The Unfinished Novel'', is set in the 1930s and involves a young [[protagonist]], Vincent Hammell, who seeks to write a [[biography]] of an elder poet, Jorris Buxton. Buxton's character is loosely based on the nineteenth century [[Romanticism|Romantic]] poet [[Walter Savage Landor]].<ref name="powells"/> Writer and critic [[Cynthia Ozick]] praised the novel's "skillful narrative" and "complex characters", writing, "''The Journey Abandoned'' is a crowded gallery of carefully delineated portraits whose innerness is divulged partly through dialogue but far more extensively in passages of cannily analyzed insight."<ref>{{Citation | last = Ozick | first = Cynthia | authorlink = Cynthia Ozick | url = http://tnr.com/story_print.html?id=b12db0e0-c81d-417d-b138-c7c633dbbbc1 | title = Novel or Nothing | postscript =, review of ''The Journey Abandoned: The Unfinished Novel.'' | journal = [[The New Republic]] | date= 2008-05-28 | accessdate = 2008-05-27 }} {{Dead link|date=September 2010|bot=H3llBot}}</ref>+
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-==Politics==+
-Trilling's politics have been strongly debated and, like much else in his thought, may be described as "complex." An often-quoted summary of Trilling's politics is that he wished to:<ref>1974 foreword to ''The Liberal Imagination,'' quoted and cited as "often repeated" in {{Harv|Glick|2000}}</ref>+
-:"[remind] people who prided themselves on being liberals that liberalism was ... a political position which affirmed the value of individual existence in all its variousness, complexity, and difficulty."+
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-Politically, Trilling was a noted member of the anti-Stalinist left, a position that he maintained to the end of his life.<ref>Writing in the 1974 foreword to his 1950 collection ''The Liberal Imagination,'' (shortly before his 1975 death) he wrote that the essays were "with reference to a particular political-cultural situation, ... [namely] the commitment that a large segment of the intelligentsia of the West gave to the degraded version of Marxism known as Stalinism." {{Harv|Glick|2000}}</ref>+
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-===Liberal===+
-In his earlier years, Trilling wrote for and in the liberal tradition, explicitly rejecting conservativism; from the preface to his ''The Liberal Imagination,'' 1950, emphasis added to much-quoted last line:+
-:In the United States at this time Liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in ''irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas''.+
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-===Neoconservative===+
-Some, both conservative and liberal, argue that Trilling's views became steadily more conservative over time, and Trilling has been embraced as sympathetic to [[neoconservativism]] by neoconservatives (such as [[Norman Podhoretz]], editor of ''Commentary''), though this embrace was unrequited, Trilling criticizing the [[New Left]] (as he had the [[Old Left]]), but not embracing neoconservativism. The extent to which Trilling may be identified with neoconservativism continues to be contentious, forming a point of debate.<ref>Rodden, 2000</ref>+
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-===Moderate===+
-Trilling has alternatively been characterized as solidly moderate, as evidenced by many statements, ranging from the very title of his novel, ''The '''Middle''' of the Journey'', to a central passage from the novel:<ref>{{Harv|Glick|2000}} writes "several reviewers quoted [this passage] as Trilling's central point"</ref>+
-:"An absolute freedom from responsibility – that much of a child none of us can be. An absolute responsibility – that much of a divine or metaphysical essence none of us is."+
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-Along the same lines, in reply to a taunt by [[Richard Sennett]], "You have no position; you are always in between," Trilling replied, "Between is the only honest place to be."<ref>Quoted in Sennett essay in {{Harv|Rodden|2000}}</ref>+
==Works by Trilling== ==Works by Trilling==

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Lionel Mordecai Trilling (July 4, 1905 – November 5, 1975) was an American literary critic, author, and teacher. With wife Diana Trilling, he was a member of the New York Intellectuals and contributor to the Partisan Review. Although he did not establish a school of literary criticism, he is one of the leading U.S. critics of the twentieth century who traced the contemporary cultural, social, and political implications of literature. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he has been a subject of continued interest.

He is known for such essay collections as Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning.

[edit]

Works by Trilling

Fiction

Non-Fiction and Essays

Prefaces, Afterwards, and Commentaries


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