Lionel Trilling
Lionel Trilling ( born July 4, 1905 in New York; † November 5, 1975 ) was an American literary critic, writer and teacher. He belonged to the group of the New York Intellectuals and wrote regularly for the Partisan Review. He is considered one of the most important American literary critic of his time.
Life
He studied at Columbia University, where he Whittaker Chambers and the cultural historian Jacques Barzun came to know, among other things, he graduated in 1926. There he taught from 1932 to 1939 as a lecturer in literature and in 1938 received his doctorate. Together with Barzun he regularly gave the famous " Great Books " course, which dealt with the most important authors of intellectual history. In 1948 he was appointed full professor, an office which he held until 1974. His students included among others, the writer and women's rights activist Carolyn Heilbrun.
Work
His only novel, The Middle of the Journey, which describes the life of a wealthy Communist pair, appeared in 1947. He became famous through his foreword to the new edition of George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia from the year 1952. Treat Other well-known works Jane Austen, the Kinsey Report, TS Eliot and Rudyard Kipling.
His most important political essays he gave out 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 Second World War. Trilling's second important book of essays called The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent. His critical writings include The culture Opposing Self (1955 ), A Gathering of Fugitives (1956) and Beyond Culture (1965 ), dealing with the problem of social identity in modernity. Sincerity and Authenticity (1972 ) is an attempt to grasp the idea of authenticity as the most important aesthetic concept since the Enlightenment.
His form of cultural critique in the tradition of Matthew Arnold, the psychoanalytic study also Trilling's Matthew Arnold ( 1939) is dedicated. Other monographs dealing with EM Forster (1943) and Sigmund Freud (The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 1962).
The Marxist beliefs that characterize his early writings, soft since the time of The Liberal Imagination, which particularly criticized the seduction of the intellectuals by Stalinism, a moderate conservatism; However, the emergence of the neoconservative movement in the 70s, he watched with suspicion. One of his most famous student is Norman Podhoretz.
His most important essays were reissued in 2000 under the title The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent.
Trilling was with Diana Trilling, Rubin born, married, who emerged as a literary critic himself.