American Literary History Diana Trilling biography R. Gordan review (original) (raw)

There is just one case I know of where two brilliant young writers published dueling short stories about each other, in which each is the protagonist and his best friend the antagonist. Who were the writers who would do such a thing? One was the young Lionel Trilling, who was to become a professor of English, a leading critic, public intellectual and opinion-shaper in the culture of twentieth-century America and beyond. The other was my father, Henry M. Rosenthal, in his youth a rabbi, later a philosophy professor, of whom Trilling said, "He was the only man I ever knew whom I would call a genius." Trilling described my father as "my closest friend at college." Yet they did not remain friends.

This essay examines Lionel Trilling’s success in appealing to a variety of ad hoc publics – to a kind of “periodical imagination,” that is – while maintaining the generalist’s guise of disinterestedness, a tactic common to many public intellectuals today. It also explores how the critical essay emerged quite distinctly in the aggressive mixture of Modernism and Marxism that dominated Partisan Review’s early writings. The variety of magazines Trilling wrote for helped to forge his place as spokesman for a revamped liberal culture in America throughout the 1940s and 1950s.

In this article, I intend to look into the issue of the relation of History to Literature through the works of the American literary critic Lionel Trilling (1905-1975). Therefore, I will both analyze Trilling’s argument in favor of the historicity of literature and will relate this argument to Trilling´s interest in the history of sensibilities. Finally, I intend to look into the historicity of Trilling’s own arguments. In doing so, I hope to show that Trilling becomes part of a particular branch of American literary history, alongside Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James, which is marked by the awareness that every self is inevitably historically shaped.

This paper is a feminist approach to Susan Glaspell's Trifles. It handles the marital discordance which results in misanthropy. Mrs. Wright in this play is a woman who falls victim to the suppression and marginalization of her husband, Mr. Wright. The hard-hearted husband destroys her human feelings out of neglect, a matter that ends in killing her husband. The subject is presented from a purely feminine perspective in that Mrs. Wright's character is fully revealed through the female characters' reactions. In fact, Trifles creates the impression that Glaspell is in full advocacy of women's right to reach self-fulfillment away from any form of social dictations. Matrimonial relationships must be compatible in order to enjoy a rather entertaining and continuous repose of mind.

Resume: Selon Dawn Sardella-Ayres, le triangle amoureux de la trilogie Emilie de L.M. Montgomery reproduit, a des degres divers, celui que l'on retrouve dans Les Quatre Filles du docteur March . Les deux heroines, Emilie et Jo, doivent choisir entre des hommes representant l'ordre patriarcal et leurs amis d'enfance. La decision des personnages influence directement leur carriere litteraire. Puisque Louisa May Alcott et L.M. Montgomery ne pouvaient decrire la vie d'ecrivaines vieilles filles, la trilogie modifie le choix de Jo et accorde a Emilie plus d'autonomie dans son mariage. Summary: This paper suggests that the love triangle depicted in L.M. Montgomery's Emily trilogy duplicates, with different results, the one in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women . Both Emily and Jo must choose between older patriarchal men and childhood boy-next-door friends, and their choices directly affect their writing careers. Because neither Alcott nor Montgomery could write ...

Examines the influence of Eliot’s early poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” on Lewis’s dream vision fantasy The Great Divorce

Chapter 3 continues with the focus on ‘modernism’ but from a different perspective from Joyce. Art, aestheticism, the cultural role of the artist, and the inter-relationship among the arts in modernism provide the wider critical framework for our reading of Wyndham Lewis’s satiric novel Tarr (1918, 1928). In contrast to Joyce’s affirmative interiority, Lewis, along with other modernist writers and painters, aggressively champions the external and the objective, providing us with an opportunity to complicate our notion of modernism by identifying a second current within the modernist stream. Lewis’s painterly concentration on the objective and the external has important implications not only for the novel’s form, but for the particular inflections of its language. Lewis’s comic point of view allows us to investigate the place of satire and the satiric spirit in modernity. Chapter 4 directs our attention to a third current in modernism. D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1921) attempts to reconcile the clash of the inward and the external, that is, the contrasting currents of early modernism. It engages, like T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land (1922), the notion of mythopoeic consciousness as the mediating epistemology of the modern. The transgressive potential of mythic thought is fully exploited by Lawrence in his treatment of identity and character, of individual and community, of the personal politics of domination and submission. The novel will also be considered as an attempt to reconcile the experimentalism of Joyce and Lewis and the traditional realism inherited from the great Victorians, chiefly the fiction of Thomas Hardy. The matter of the relationship among the arts, especially the relationship between literature and the visual arts, and literature and music will also be considered.