The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society
A Politics, Philosophy, Criticism book. We live, understandably enough, with the sense of urgency; our clock,...
The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling's essays examine the promise—and limits—of liberalism, challenging the complacency of a naïve liberal belief in rationality, progress, and the panaceas of economics and other social sciences, and asserting in their stead the irreducible complexity...
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- Filetype: PDF
- Pages: 284 pages
- ISBN: 9780151511976 / 151511977
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More About The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society
Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society // We live, understandably enough, with the sense of urgency; our clock, like Baudelaires, has had the hands removed and bears the legend, It is later than you think. But with us it is always a little too late for mind, yet never too late for honest stupidity; always a little too late for understanding, never too late for righteous, bewildered wrath; always too late for thought, never too late for nave moralizing. We seem to like to condemn our finest but not our worst qualities by pitting them against the exigency of time. Lionel Trilling, Liberal Imagination... Man is an inextricable tangle of culture and biology. And not being simple, he is not simply good; he has a kind of hell within him from which rise everlastingly the impulses which threaten his civilization. He has the faculty of imagining for himself more in the way of pleasure and satisfaction than he can possibly achieve. Everything that he gains he pays for in more than equal coin; compromise and the compounding with defeat constitute his best way of getting through the world. His best qualities are the result of a struggle whose outcome is tragic....
i did more thinking in the course of reading this book than i've done in the last three years. which is not exactly to say that i learned anything or indeed understood a word of it, as my brain is like a lump of clay. and yet still i felt a certain stirring inside, and my dreams have become startling and strange. entirely worth it just... Well, this guy is brilliant. His essays are investigations into the political ramifications of our literature: not in any foolish way either, but talking about the deep assumptions of the culture and how the stories we tell and the way that we tell them interacts with those assumptions. He is learned and wry. His raised-eyebrow regard... Not every single essay in Lionel Trilling's collection of 'The Liberal Imagination' was relevant to my limited interests. Nevertheless I was able to find some really good bits and pieces here and there...In order to understand Trilling's approach to evaluating literature, it must be first said that he sees literature as more than something...
