Lionel Trilling
Lionel Trilling
Lionel Mordecai Trillingwas an American literary critic, short story writer, essayist, and teacher. He was one of the leading U.S. critics of the twentieth century who traced the contemporary cultural, social, and political implications of literature. With his wife Diana Trilling, whom he married in 1929, he was a member of the New York Intellectuals and contributor to the Partisan Review...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCritic
Date of Birth4 July 1905
CountryUnited States of America
Economic man and the Calvinist Christian sing to each other like voices in a fugue. The Calvinist stands alone before an almost merciless God ; no human agency can help him; his church is a means to political and social organization rather than a bridge to deity , for no priest can have greater knowledge of the divine way than he himself; no friend can console him in fact , he should distrust all men; in the same fashion, Economic Man faces a merciless world alone and unaided, his hand against every other's.
We have all in some degree become anarchistic.
Reasons for not keeping a notebook: 1) the ambiguity of the reader--it is never quite oneself. 2) I usually hate the sight of my handwriting--it lives too much and I dislike its life--I mean by "lives," of course, betrays too much!
Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind, we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind we will not like.
We are all ill; but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health.
We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.
The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.
What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.
Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing - he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.
There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.
If one defends the bourgeois, philistine virtues, one does not defend them merely from the demonism or bohemianism of the artist but from the present bourgeoisie itself.
The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
It is possible that the contemplation of cruelty will not make us humane but cruel; that the reiteration of the badness of our spiritual condition will make us consent to it.
Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all to the end that someone else should not perform the same process.