Lionel Trilling

Lionel Trilling (born July 4, 1905 in New York , † November 5, 1975 ibid) was an American literary critic , writer and teacher . He was a member of the New York Intellectuals group and wrote regularly for the Partisan Review . He is considered one of the most important American literary critics of his time.

Life

He graduated from Columbia University in 1926 , where he met Whittaker Chambers and the cultural historian Jacques Barzun , among others . There he taught from 1932 to 1939 as a lecturer in literature and received his doctorate in 1938. Together with Barzun, he regularly held the famous "Big Books Course", which dealt with the most important authors of intellectual history. In 1948 he was appointed full professor, an office that he held until 1974. In 1951 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1952 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Among his students was the writer and women's rights activist Carolyn Heilbrun .

Trilling was with Diana Trilling , geb. Rubin, married, who also stood out as a literary critic.

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His only novel, The Middle of the Journey , which describes the life of a wealthy communist couple, was published in 1947. He became famous for his foreword to the new edition of George Orwell's My Catalonia from 1952. Other well-known works deal with Jane Austen , the Kinsey- Report , TS Eliot and Rudyard Kipling .

He published his most important political essays in 1950 under the title The Liberal Imagination , a book that attempts to analyze the decline of political culture in the United States after the end of World War II. Trilling's second important volume of essays is called The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent . His culture-critical writings include The Opposing Self (1955), A Gathering of Fugitives (1956) and Beyond Culture (1965), which deal with the problem of social identity in modern times. Sincerity and Authenticity (1972) is an attempt to understand the idea of authenticity as the most important aesthetic concept since the Enlightenment .

His form of cultural criticism is in the tradition of Matthew Arnold , to which Trilling's psychoanalytic study Matthew Arnold (1939) is dedicated. Further monographs deal with EM Forster (1943) and Sigmund Freud ( The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud , 1962).

The Marxist convictions that shaped his early writings have given way to moderate conservatism since the time of The Liberal Imagination , which particularly criticized the seduction of intellectuals by Stalinism ; However, he viewed the emergence of the neoconservative movement in the 1970s with suspicion. One of his most famous students is Norman Podhoretz .

His most important essays were re-edited in 2000 under the title The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent .

literature

Catalog raisonné

• Matthew Arnold . New York 1939.
• The Liberal Imagination. Essays on Literature and Society . London 1950.
• The Opposing Self. Nine Essays in Criticism. London 1955.
• Beyond Culture. Essays on Literature and Learning . New York 1965.
• Sincerity and Authenticity . London 1972.
• Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling . Edited by Adam Kirsch, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2018, ISBN 978-0-374-18515-2

further reading

• M. Krupnick: Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism . Evanston 1986.
• SL Tanner: Lionel Trilling . Boston 1988.
• J. Rodden (eds.): Lionel Trilling & the Critics: Opposing Selves (University of Nebraska Press, 1999).

Web links

• Literature by and about Lionel Trilling in the catalog of the German National Library
• Quotes from Lionel Trilling
• His page on the Columbia University homepage

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Members: Lionel Trilling. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 30, 2019 .