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A Study of Humanism in Lionel Trilling’s Literary Criticism

Author: ChengXiaoXue
Tutor: DongHongChuan
School: Sichuan International Studies University
Course: Comparative Literature and World Literature
Keywords: Lionel Trilling Humanism sincerity moral self-realization
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Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2011
Downloads: 44
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Abstract

Among American critics of the twentieth century, Lionel Trilling (1905—1975) is one of the most distinguished literary and cultural critics and he is a traditional humanist. Lionel Trilling is a famous professor in Columbia University and one of the members of New York Intellectuals. Trilling knows much more about the history, literature, culture in Europe. He gives the careful browse of the culture in the level of moral from a special angel. He tries to transcend himself, taking literature as the place of uncontrolled wandering about. He deeply analyzes literature, society, politics, and morality and their relationship. All in all, Trilling’s criticism tries to elaborate the manifestations of the literary individual in self-making in different cultures, at different periods, from different angles. Trilling’s criticism is inclusive which centers on the literature in Europe and in the United States in nineteenth and twentieth century. Trilling’s literary criticism takes literature and art as the reflection the whole era from the microcosmic, and the vanguard. He insists on that literature is the criticism of life.Trilling’s doctoral dissertation Matthew Arnold gives us the way to read his thoughts. He is productive, with the works of E.M. Forster, In the Middle of the Journey, The Liberal Imagination, The Last Decades, and Beyond Culture, in which the liberal and humanistic stance is stated and the attempt of reconciling the situation while in modern literature. One of his book The Liberal Imagination, Prefaces to the experience of literature focus on the literary criticism of many works in Europe, involving in many people, such as Sherwood Anderson, Huckleberry Finn, Kipling, Fitzgerald, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, William Black and so on. As a traditional humanist, one of the critical essays of Trilling“what is criticism”in volume The Last Decade reaffirms his ideas of humanistic ideas. He has retrospected the actuality and the intellectual plight to manifest his inner world relating the rational, science, and the idea of humanism. And finally he displayed his uncertainty of the idea of education.Sincerity and Authenticity by Trilling is the Norton Lecture in Harvard University. In this lecture the everlasting charming of culture and history in the past four hundred years in Europe is manifested through the analysis of the dialectical relation between‘sincerity’and‘authenticity’. His topic is complex and various which is as broad as the culture in the past four years.Strictly speaking, Lionel Trilling is a liberal cultural critic. He analyzes literature in the modern temperament, relating society, culture and politics. This dissertation mainly explores the humanism in Lionel Trilling’s literary criticism. It focuses on Trilling’s reaffirmation of social and moral values, human values and relationship between people and society through discovering of the devaluation of social and moral values and decaying of human values in the period of industrialism in modern cultural temperament. That is to say, it should liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to stand beyond it in autonomy of perception and judgment. This dissertation is divided into five parts: introduction, body chapters, and conclusion. In introduction the content and the status of Trilling as literary critic is listed. There are three chapters in body which mainly focuses on: 1. the humanism and Lionel Trilling’s Literary Criticism; which is the brief retrospect of the History and the development of Humanism in the west and introduction of Lionel Trilling and the outline of Lionel Trilling’s literary criticism including the critical reception of Lionel Trilling in the western world. 2. Concern on the human condition in Lionel Trilling’s criticism of literature; 3. Focus on the Salvation of Modern Man. In conclusion, the author concludes that through sorting out Lionel Trilling’s Literary Criticism, his idea of humanism is clearly identified. And through browse the four-hundred years of literature in west, Trilling’s concern on man in his criticism is the supplement and development to humanism.

A Study of Humanism in Lionel Trilling’s Literary Criticism

Abstract

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