...Katie Fitzpatrick This article reads Lionel Trilling’s 1947 novel, The Middle of the Journey , through postwar controversies about the relationship between law and conscience. The 1945–46 Nuremberg Trials divided American liberals, who disputed whether fascism was best combated by fidelity...

...Jeff Solomon m Capote and the Trillings: Homophobia and Literary Culture at Midcentury Jeff Solomon I n a reminiscence published in George Plimpton’s oral history of Tru­ man Capote, Diana Trilling recounts her and her husband Lionel’s first meeting with Capote, almost...

... private project of self-cultivation. The article critically assesses this position, traces its implications in Wharton’s fiction and nonfiction, and briefly reviews its place within the broader context of liberal thought from Kant, through Matthew Arnold, to Lionel Trilling. Copyright © 2018 Hofstra...

... with a fresh eye at the object under consideration and not to get up from the desk until a genuinely fresh view of that object has coalesced and found its proper expres­ sion. As a critic, you have not done your job unless what you say is interesting. “Capote and the Trillings: Homophobia...

... and disposed to struggle with unfamiliar, even offensive or off- putting works of art. And of course the audience for modernist art grew as more and more people wished to think themselves advanced and open to the shock of the new. In 1961 Lionel Trilling published “On the Teaching of Modern...

... in achieving so- cial equality in a civilized society. In linking the fate of democracy with that of aesthetics, the poem anticipates that fusion of progressive politics and literary modernism evoked by Lionel Trilling’s phrase “the liberal imagination.” In the preface to his book of that title...

... the essentialist discourse to which the novel’s critics have objected. The way production is yoked to reproduction would indeed seem to assume the sexed division between intellectual and biological creativity and, further, to give tribute to what Trilling called “the waning cult of Woman” ([1966] 1979, 22...

... codified and institutionalized (and what is lost and gained through this process) is at once the story of modernism itself, and the story of the field of modernist studies, which has struggled since at least the era of Lionel Trilling with the problem of what it means to canonize rebellion. But not only...

... foreign policy critique, of direct political anti-imperial analysis, would have to wait for the dawn of the postsocialist period. Pease makes this same point by discussing how Lionel Trilling castigated Matthiessen for his implicit endorsement of Theodore Dreiser in 1946—after he had just joined...

... experience to Passage prompted Forster’s friend Roger Fry to say that although the writing was beautiful he wished Forster “weren’t a mystic, or that he would keep his mysticism out of his books” (qtd. in Trilling 44). Though it didn’t quite put him in for the kind of contempt Woolf expressed for T...

... manners, these novels represented precisely the ethos of liberal humanism and cultural centrism denounced by intellectuals such as Diana Trilling. Hutner also contests the academic critical story of the 1950s as the period of fiction’s supposed loss of its reading public. Intellectuals...

... such as of race, class, and gender. In the first book-length scholarly study of Forster’s work, Lionel Trilling in 1943 paved the way for a dismissive reading of these stories as at best precursors to the novels: “The Greek myths made too deep an im­ pression on Forster” (38). O f the 12...

..., expressing merely the hope that positive affects might become interesting again. 4. For work on “only connect’s” relationship to Forster’s alleged liberal humanism, see Jameson, Stone, Trilling, Bradbury, Levenson, and White. Although I tend to regard “liberal” and “humanist” as loaded labels...

... the years; following Trilling’s influential 1943 study, represen­ tative examples include virtually every essay in the anthology edited by Bradbury. For more recent reconsiderations of liberalism see Armstrong, who highlights the importance of architecture and horizontal spatial movement in the novel...

..., one articulated by Lionel Trilling. Drawing on Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground,Trifling suggests that modern literature renounces what Wordsworth and Keats celebrated as everyday joy or pleasure. Modern man, represented by Dostoevsky’s miserable clerk, hates what Trilling refers...

... Millett to condemn Miller’s sex scenes as a “gray abstraction of ‘organ grinding’” (1970, 300), characters becoming reduced to sets of organs, combined and recombined with other sets. 11 Here obscenity directly opposes the humanist aesthetics of midcentury critics. While Lionel Trilling lobbied...

... not to have closure or to limit its finalizing effects; the audience can 158 LOUTA anticipate continuation as well as conclusion. Also important for Lolita, how­ ever, is the pleasure of the text itself. When Trilling argues that the reader begins to sympathize...

... 1938, the publication of The 42nd Parallel, Î919, and The Big Money as a single novel provoked a flood of essays debating how John Dos Pas- sos’s U.S.A. related socially, aesthetically, and politically to the U.S.A.1 While assessments ranged from Lionel Trilling’s ambivalent judgment...

..., desperate energy. In a 1963 essay called “The Fate of Pleasure,” Lionel Trilling contends that “at some point in modern his­ tory, the principle of pleasure came to be regarded with ambivalence” (434), which develops fully into a “repudiation of pleasure” (439) with modernists, who regard...

... and Lionel Trilling were echoed by a later genera­ tion of critics. Meanwhile, as Cather responded to such criticism with a strident defense of art as an apolitical pursuit (“Escapism,” 1936), this only seemed to give further credence to the image of her as a recalcitrant romantic who refused...