13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Literary Criticism At Its Finest", December 8, 2008
This review is from: The Liberal Imagination (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)
It is an undeniable asset to have this classic work by one of America's greatest twentieth-century critics readily available again. Let me mention right off that the vast majority of the essays here have nothing to do with the fashionable Freudianism or bygone politics of the 1950's. Trilling's concerns as a literary critic and commentator on society go much deeper. He wishes to perform for his time a similar service to that John Stuart Mill rendered contemporaries in the nineteeth-century: the reminder that in disputable questions one has the obligation to see if one's intellectual opponents may possess some necessary portion of the truth. Mill, Trilling reminds us, found in the thought and poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a man, by the way, Mill profoundly disagreed with from metaphysics on down, a vivifying opposition and a liberating opponent, surprisingly able to cure the disabling aridity in Mill's earlier emotionless soul. Trilling feared that the majority "liberals" of the 1950's were especially open to the perennial temptation of bien-pensants of all sides, times, and places - a devolution into mere conformity and rigid ideology, an abandonment of the necessity as thinkers and citizens to be ever vigilant. Trilling's equivalent of Coleridge in this volume is the Master, Henry James, an author he thought certain to offend progressives mindlessly resentful of social hierarchy and supposed aestheticism. Trilling maintained that the James of "The Princess Casamassima" had much insight about art and politics that such "advanced" types ignored at their peril. (In a later volume, the self-identified "liberal" Trilling assigned a similar teaching function to Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park," a novel heavily on the side of tradition whose greatness he declared "was commensurate with its power to offend" the complacent "liberals" of its own day, his day, and most importantly - of any other day.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
3 1/2 Stars - Criticism and Politics, September 1, 2010
This review is from: The Liberal Imagination (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)
According to this edition's excellent introduction by Louis Menand (
The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America), 'The Liberal Imagination' sold 170,000 copies in hardback and paperback upon its initial release. So when he also states that this collection of essays on literature and culture made literary criticism matter to people who were not literary critics, it is hard to doubt it. There are also a great many other things Mr. Menand points out in his brief remarks, yet after finishing the collection, what stands out most is what he says the quietest.
First, it's important to note that this book is not a random collection of essays simply recycled from literary journals - Trilling had a particular intention in mind when he gathered and revised these selections. Above all, from both his preface and from the inherent points within his writing, it is apparent that he believed in a liberalism that, in its purity, seems to barely resemble today's common usage - often as not used as a shortcut term for certain political positions rather than a belief in social betterment through systemic change. Regardless, though, of how liberalism's definition may have changed over the years, Trilling sought, with this book, not to confirm liberalism 'in its sense of general rightness but rather in putting under some degree of pressure the liberal ideas and assumptions of the present time'. These ideas Trilling understood to have been somewhat corrupted by the process of dissemination and implementation, and he hoped with his critiques 'to recall liberalism to its first essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty'. Thus, 'The Liberal Imagination'.
Lionel Trilling found the 'liberal ideas and assumptions' in both contemporary (to him) literature, and in the writers of the past who 'command our continuing attention'. That is how a book of literary criticism is also a book about culture and politics. If each selection here were only a microcosmic example of that criticism, then Mr. Trilling would have fulfilled his goal - yet he takes it a step further still. Surely it is no accident that the first essay is 'Reality in America', and the last is 'The Meaning of a Literary Idea' - enforcing a structure over the entire book that moves from 'what is' to 'recalling liberalism to its imagination'. It is an extremely subtle dialectical approach, where each essay builds on previous material not so much like links in a chain but rather like equidistant guideposts just barely within sight of one another.
Lastly - by way of summary - there was also one other goal. Since Mr. Trilling was well aware of the possible abuses inherent in pursuing liberal social theory, he designed 'The Liberal Imagination' to warn of those excesses and to refute Stalinist ideology. This was admitted by Mr. Trilling himself, years later, as noted in the introduction. So indirectly does he approach it though (or because of the gulf that separates the last sixty years) that frankly, many readers may miss this idea entirely without help, as this reader would have. This blind spot accurately summarizes the sea change of reference points between his time and ours, and it also illustrates what Mr. Menand lightly touches on near the end of his introduction - what level of relevance can this book have to today?
That isn't to suggest there is none - to the extent that the two time periods share similarities, the author's comments are still worthwhile - but the liberal imagination of the 1950's seems essentially different from the liberal ideology of today, so much so that they might not recognize one another if they were to meet. Political commentary through literary criticism has fragmented into special interest agendas instead of a call for cohesiveness, and Lionel Trilling's attempt to be liberalism's gadfly is quaint and outdated, no matter how appealing that intellectual tradition appears in the rear-view mirror.
Despite this, there are still good reasons to spend time with these essays. Taken individually, they are of interest purely on the literary level, and Trilling's challenging style is excellent mental exercise. Concerning subjects as varied as Huckleberry Finn, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and the Kinsey Report, these essays examine the country's moral life as often as its political one, though perhaps in his day, these two were not yet divorced from one another. Yet even this simpler approach to Trilling's work has its problems, as the upheavals of the 1960's - and the resultant attitude shifts - were still almost two decades away from the time of his writing. In retrospect, social changes of the last forty years make his assumptions and conclusions incomplete.
But in his cautionary statements, he could be prescient. 'Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood'. If that doesn't describe our current situation, nothing does.
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