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plan2read's review against another edition
3.0
Explores the relationship between emotions, ideas, and ideology and how fiction acts as a vehicle for their communication. More or less, fiction in service of ideology remains thin, but when able to confront complex ideas based on conflicting emotions, the novel can still achieve an active relevance.
“A culture is not a flow, nor even a confluence; the form of its existence is struggle, or at least debate”
“There is no single meaning to any work of art; this is not true merely because it is better that it should be true, that is, because it makes art a richer thing, but because historical and personal experience show it to be true. . . . Even if the author’s intention were, as it cannot be, precisely determinable, the meaning of a work cannot lie in the author’s intention alone. It must also lie in its effects.”
“Too often we conceive of an idea as being like the baton that is handed from runner to runner in a relay race. But an idea as a transmissible thing is rather like the sentence that in the parlor game is whispered about in a circle; the point of the game is the amusement that comes when the last version is compared with the original.“
“When we try to estimate the power of literature, we must not be misled by the fancy pictures of history. Now and then periods do occur when the best literature overflows its usual narrow bounds and reaches a large mass of the people. . . . It is what we must always hope for and work for. But in actual fact the occasions are rare when the best literature becomes, as it were, the folk literature, and generally speaking literature has always been carried on within small limits and under great difficulties.”
“But from this very sense of its immediacy to life we have come to overvalue the novel. We have, for example, out of awareness of its power, demanded that it change the world; no genre has ever had so great a burden of social requirement put upon it (which, incidentally, it has very effectively discharged), or has been so strictly ordered to give up, in the fulfillment of its assigned function, all that was unconscious and ambivalent and playful in itself.”
“Ideas, if they are large enough and of a certain kind, are not only not hostile to the creative process, as some think, but are virtually inevitable to it. Intellectual power and emotional power go together. . . . In any extended work of literature, the aesthetic effect . . . depends in large degree upon intellectual power, upon the amount and recalcitrance of the material the mind works on, and upon the mind’s success in mastering the large material. . . . But the extreme rationalist position ignores the simple fact that the life of reason, at least in its most extensive part, begins in the emotions. What comes into being when two contradictory emotions are made to confront each other and are required to have a relationship with each other is, as I have said, quite properly called an idea. . . . And it can be said that a work will have what I have been calling cogency in the degree that the confronting emotions go deep.”
“A culture is not a flow, nor even a confluence; the form of its existence is struggle, or at least debate”
“There is no single meaning to any work of art; this is not true merely because it is better that it should be true, that is, because it makes art a richer thing, but because historical and personal experience show it to be true. . . . Even if the author’s intention were, as it cannot be, precisely determinable, the meaning of a work cannot lie in the author’s intention alone. It must also lie in its effects.”
“Too often we conceive of an idea as being like the baton that is handed from runner to runner in a relay race. But an idea as a transmissible thing is rather like the sentence that in the parlor game is whispered about in a circle; the point of the game is the amusement that comes when the last version is compared with the original.“
“When we try to estimate the power of literature, we must not be misled by the fancy pictures of history. Now and then periods do occur when the best literature overflows its usual narrow bounds and reaches a large mass of the people. . . . It is what we must always hope for and work for. But in actual fact the occasions are rare when the best literature becomes, as it were, the folk literature, and generally speaking literature has always been carried on within small limits and under great difficulties.”
“But from this very sense of its immediacy to life we have come to overvalue the novel. We have, for example, out of awareness of its power, demanded that it change the world; no genre has ever had so great a burden of social requirement put upon it (which, incidentally, it has very effectively discharged), or has been so strictly ordered to give up, in the fulfillment of its assigned function, all that was unconscious and ambivalent and playful in itself.”
“Ideas, if they are large enough and of a certain kind, are not only not hostile to the creative process, as some think, but are virtually inevitable to it. Intellectual power and emotional power go together. . . . In any extended work of literature, the aesthetic effect . . . depends in large degree upon intellectual power, upon the amount and recalcitrance of the material the mind works on, and upon the mind’s success in mastering the large material. . . . But the extreme rationalist position ignores the simple fact that the life of reason, at least in its most extensive part, begins in the emotions. What comes into being when two contradictory emotions are made to confront each other and are required to have a relationship with each other is, as I have said, quite properly called an idea. . . . And it can be said that a work will have what I have been calling cogency in the degree that the confronting emotions go deep.”
testpattern's review against another edition
4.0
This book is very much of its time, a great illustration of New Criticism or whatever, the last bastion of American critical thought unsullied by the dread French invasion of the 1960s. It's almost quaint. Nevertheless, Trilling was a wonderfully perceptive reader, and this volume of essays contains several real gems.
tome15's review
4.0
Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination. 1950. Introduction by Louis Menand. New York Review of Books, 2009.
Lionel Trilling’s classic collection of essays from such journals as the Partisan Review in the 1940s provides a refreshing antidote to the tweets and blog posts that often serve for critical thought these days. Trilling was, according to Louis Menand, a “liberal anticommunist” with a grudge against the American Marxism typified by the literary historian V. L. Parrington. Parrington, he said, had a narrowly materialist view of reality. Trilling’s critique of Marxism made old-school radicals like Irving Howe say he lacked social conscience. Trilling has a sharp eye for the overly simple. He admires Freud but is critical of Sherwood Anderson and others who oversimplified Freudian insights. Even Freud, he says, does that at times. He praises Henry James and Mark Twain, both of whom he said had a well-nuanced realism. In talking about Twain, he quotes Pascal’s comment that a river is a road that moves. Huckleberry Finn, he says, has moral passion and a good blend of romantic imagination and social realism. Trilling also admires the blend of realism and romanticism in the early Wordsworth. Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode, he says, is not a poem about growing old but a poem about growing up. He appreciates Tacitus for having a more nuanced view of history than he is usually credited with. He deplores Kipling for oversimplifying nationalism and Kinsey for dehumanizing sex. He likes the moral realism of European comedy of manners, a form he says is rare in American literature. F. Scott Fitzgerald he sees as a moralist who depicts an unresolved struggle between free will and circumstance. Trilling does not think the novel is a dead form, but he does not like writers he thinks ideological or self-indulgent, like Dos Passos, O’Neill and Wolfe. He prefers writers like Faulkner and Hemingway who express all the contradictions in American culture. In sum, Trilling’s attack on Parrington may be beating an already dead horse, and I am not sure many would agree that The Princess Casamassima is the best novel by Henry James. But his discussions of Twain and Wordsworth are thoughtful and his warnings against ideological excesses are more apt than ever. 4 stars.
Lionel Trilling’s classic collection of essays from such journals as the Partisan Review in the 1940s provides a refreshing antidote to the tweets and blog posts that often serve for critical thought these days. Trilling was, according to Louis Menand, a “liberal anticommunist” with a grudge against the American Marxism typified by the literary historian V. L. Parrington. Parrington, he said, had a narrowly materialist view of reality. Trilling’s critique of Marxism made old-school radicals like Irving Howe say he lacked social conscience. Trilling has a sharp eye for the overly simple. He admires Freud but is critical of Sherwood Anderson and others who oversimplified Freudian insights. Even Freud, he says, does that at times. He praises Henry James and Mark Twain, both of whom he said had a well-nuanced realism. In talking about Twain, he quotes Pascal’s comment that a river is a road that moves. Huckleberry Finn, he says, has moral passion and a good blend of romantic imagination and social realism. Trilling also admires the blend of realism and romanticism in the early Wordsworth. Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode, he says, is not a poem about growing old but a poem about growing up. He appreciates Tacitus for having a more nuanced view of history than he is usually credited with. He deplores Kipling for oversimplifying nationalism and Kinsey for dehumanizing sex. He likes the moral realism of European comedy of manners, a form he says is rare in American literature. F. Scott Fitzgerald he sees as a moralist who depicts an unresolved struggle between free will and circumstance. Trilling does not think the novel is a dead form, but he does not like writers he thinks ideological or self-indulgent, like Dos Passos, O’Neill and Wolfe. He prefers writers like Faulkner and Hemingway who express all the contradictions in American culture. In sum, Trilling’s attack on Parrington may be beating an already dead horse, and I am not sure many would agree that The Princess Casamassima is the best novel by Henry James. But his discussions of Twain and Wordsworth are thoughtful and his warnings against ideological excesses are more apt than ever. 4 stars.
ryancahill's review against another edition
There’s nothing like some good old-fashioned dense, mid-century American literary criticism. I have read practically no lit. criticism since college and it took me a moment to get back into the groove of reading theory, but once I did these essays proved surprisingly timely. What connects each essay (spanning from Huck Finn to The Kinsey Report) is the political discourse around liberalism and Trilling’s call for more rigorous intellect among his contemporaries, in literature, and in public discourse. Trilling is somewhat pessimistic (I can only wonder what he would think of the state of the novel in 2021, since he discusses its death in the 1950s), and his admiration for Freud is excessive, to say the least, but his prose and argumentation are exacting. Trilling is an imposing critic, one that is both challenging and thrilling to read.
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