Lionel Trilling and Cultural Criticism: A Discourse against Dogma
The IUP Journal of American Literature, Vol. III, No. 3, pp. 43-52, August 2010
Posted: 24 Sep 2010
Date Written: September 23, 2010
Abstract
Cultural criticism, being one of the major offshoots of historical criticism, finds considerable voice in Lionel Trilling’s criticism. Trilling, in his concept of history and historical criticism, seems to be sharpest and most trenchant in obvious though implied responses to the poignant and fundamental questions emerging from contemporary cultural experiences. His understanding of the fact, as expressed in The Opposing Self (1955), that the ‘self’ gains knowledge of its own being by first learning of the force continually suppressing it - an awareness of the relationship between the self and its oppressor, the surrounding culture - places him amongst the critics who have paved the way for modern critical thinking. His is an incessant search for interesting and vital ways in which the relationship can be negotiated in criticism. In the course of the evaluation of those ways, a ‘moral awareness’ also develops, eventually resulting in the growth of aesthetic sensitivity. For Trilling, a work of art is neither an object nor a subject; it rather moves dialectically in relation to the stuff of life, out of which it has come. This paper makes an assessment of Trilling’s criticism in this sphere and the relevance of the same at present when new historicism and other related domains have made their advent.
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