A Trilling Look at Literary Criticism

Perhaps more so than the books they review, literary critics fall in and out of fashion. This tendency is only natural. In the brief history of modern English departments, the same pattern has repeated itself time and again: Once-radical ideas become the critical standard. That standard is in place for a while. New critics emerge to complicate the standard. And the old ideas are either modified or displaced. As old ideas are displaced, so, too, are the critics who advanced them. Before you know it, today’s sacred cow becomes tomorrow’s ground beef. (Gayatri Spivak, beware.)

The upside to this oedipal cycle? It leaves plenty of room for nostalgia. With time, old ideas, and their champions, can be appreciated anew. On Friday afternoon, nostalgia was in effect, as a crowd of academics gathered in the Graduate Student Lounge in Philosophy Hall to revisit the life and work of Lionel Trilling, university professor emeritus in the English department.

The conference, titled “Lionel Trilling and His Legacy,” began with essays delivered by Louis Menand of Harvard University, Geraldine Murphy of City College, and Columbia’s own Ross Posnock. It also featured a panel of Trilling’s former colleagues at Columbia—among them, Fritz Stern and George Stade—who reflected on their time with the man. As the afternoon went on, man and myth became increasingly hard to separate.

Trilling, CC ’25 and GSAS ’38, was one of the most celebrated public intellectuals of his day. The first Jewish professor in the English department, he rose to fame as one of the “New York Intellectuals” (a group whose members included Saul Bellow and Irving Howe) and a writer for Partisan Review. He also published acclaimed studies of Matthew Arnold and E.M. Forster, before trying his hand at novel-writing with The Middle of the Journey. His later works—collections of essays like The Liberal Imagination, The Opposing Self, Beyond Culture, and Sincerity and Authenticity—are classics of literary criticism. He died in 1975, at age 70, and remains an iconic figure, if not a fashionable one.

Many speakers at the conference addressed the gap between Trilling’s historic prestige and his current unpopularity. During a question-and-answer period, a graduate student from Yale pointedly asked the speakers how Trilling could be made to matter to anyone under the age of 35. Posnock replied that Trilling must be taught consistently, as he represents just “the tip of the iceberg of ignorance” for today’s students, who tend to know less about postwar American criticism than they do about post-structuralism.

Posnock’s remark was telling—an echo of his claim that the conference was “needed to recover a vanished world.” Many of the conference’s participants shared this sense of mission, honoring Trilling not just as a critic, but as a symbol of a bygone era of academic prestige. Along with critic Mark Van Doren and historian Jacques Barzun, Trilling held court during Columbia’s pre-1968 golden age. As Stade put it, he was a part of “the most dazzling constellation of professors ever assembled at one American university”—a group of Cold War-era intellectuals whose work and opinions mattered to the public at large.

These men were arbiters of cultural taste for educated liberals. Yet their opinions had a broader reach, as was the case with the best-selling Liberal Imagination, which, Menand noted, “made literary criticism matter to people who were not literary critics.” If Trilling can be said to have had a consistent critical bent, this was it.

Another speaker, John Arac of the University of Pittsburgh, described Trilling’s understanding that “the study of literature was always meant to contribute to the development of critical intelligence.” Such intelligence might then be applied to the work of social progress beyond literature. To Trilling’s critics, this approach was pompous in the extreme—the high-minded meddling of an English professor. But it was in keeping with his notion that literature was “a report on experience,” with a bearing on everyday life.

Trilling’s criticism was largely a response to the realities of the Cold War, and its keen moralism seems a little dated. How, then, can it be made accessible to today’s readers? None of the conference’s participants gave a direct answer to this question, but their evaluations of his work pointed to at least one way. At the level of style, Trilling has much to offer students of literature. His prose—casually exacting and achingly eloquent—sets a standard for literary analysis that deals with complex ideas in terms that anyone can understand. He rarely makes use of jargon, and his writing illuminates far more than it obfuscates.

Consider a typical Trilling sentence: “This intense conviction of the existence of the self apart from culture is, as culture well knows, its noblest and most generous achievement.” It is a bold claim, but one that convinces through the sheer caliber of language. Trilling develops the idea with such acuity that one wants it to be true, even if one has doubts.

After reading this quotation to the audience, Menand added, “I became a critic because I wanted to write sentences” like it. Later in the day, Stern said that Trilling inspired people “to write decently and to speak decently” by his example. On Friday afternoon, his words, from criticism and conversation alike, enlivened the remarks of former colleagues and students. It was a fitting tribute to the critic—the one who always wanted to be a writer of literature—that his style lived on.