Frasi di Lionel Trilling

Lionel Mordechai Trilling è stato un critico letterario, scrittore e insegnante statunitense.

Laureato alla Columbia University, vi è rimasto come uno dei suoi insegnanti più importanti e rappresentativi. Con la moglie Diana Rubin Trilling era uno di quegli intellettuali newyorchesi che facevano gruppo e opinione, se non discussioni sulle maggiori riviste cittadine, alla Columbia e al City College di New York.

In particolare Trilling scrisse per 40 anni sulla Partisan Review.

Nonostante il successo delle due novelle Of This Time, of That Place e The Other Margaret e del romanzoThe Middle of the Journey , apprezzati a suo tempo e anche dopo, il suo vero mestiere divenne quello di critico, soprattutto della prosa sua contemporanea. Wikipedia  

✵ 4. Luglio 1905 – 5. Novembre 1975
Lionel Trilling: 32   frasi 0   Mi piace

Lionel Trilling Frasi e Citazioni

Lionel Trilling: Frasi in inglese

“The writer serves his daemon and his subject. And the democracy that does not know that the daemon and the subject must be served is not, in any ideal sense of the word, a democracy at all.”

Lionel Trilling libro The Liberal Imagination

The Function of the Little Magazine
The Liberal Imagination (1950)
Contesto: The writer must define his audience by its abilities, by its perfections, so far as he is gifted to conceive them. He does well, if he cannot see his right audience within immediate reach of his voice, to direct his words to his spiritual ancestors, or to posterity, or even, if need be, to a coterie. The writer serves his daemon and his subject. And the democracy that does not know that the daemon and the subject must be served is not, in any ideal sense of the word, a democracy at all.

“The gentlest of us will know that the tigers of wrath are to be preferred to the horses of instruction and will consider it intellectual cowardice to take into account what happens to those who ride tigers.”

Introduction
The allusion to the "tigers of wrath" and "horses of instruction" is from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Proverbs of Hell
The Portable Matthew Arnold (Viking Press, 1949)
Contesto: Disgust is expressed by violence, and it is to be noted of our intellectual temper that violence is a quality which is felt to have a peculiarly intellectual sanction. Our preference, even as articulated by those who are most mild in their persons, is increasingly for the absolute and extreme, of which we feel violence to be the true sign. The gentlest of us will know that the tigers of wrath are to be preferred to the horses of instruction and will consider it intellectual cowardice to take into account what happens to those who ride tigers.

“No literature has ever been so shockingly personal as that of our time — it asks every question that is forbidden by polite society.”

"On the Modern Element in Modern Literature," Partisan Review (January/February 1961); reprinted as "On the Teaching of Modern Literature," Beyond Culture (1965)
Contesto: A real book reads us. I have been read by Eliot's poems and by Ulysses and by Remembrance of Things Past and by The Castle for a good many years now, since early youth. Some of these books at first rejected me; I bored them. But as I grew older and they knew me better, they came to have more sympathy with me and to understand my hidden meanings. Their nature is such that our relationship has been very intimate. No literature has ever been so shockingly personal as that of our time — it asks every question that is forbidden by polite society.

“The factory was not made for man but man for the factory.”

Origine: Matthew Arnold (1939), Ch. 8
Contesto: The doctrines of Calvinism involved a reversal of values with which Arnold became increasingly concerned. Work had always been a curse and a means, but it had now turned into a blessing and an end. The production of goods had become an end in itself and the consumption of goods only the means to further production. The factory was not made for man but man for the factory.

“If we ask what it is he [ George Orwell] stands for, … the answer is: the virtue of not being a genius, of fronting the world with nothing more than one’s simple, direct, undeceived intelligence, and a respect for the powers one does have. … He communicates to us the sense that what he has done any one of us could do. Or could do if we but made up our mind to do it, if we but surrendered a little of the cant that comforts us, if for a few weeks we paid no attention to the little group with which we habitually exchange opinions, if we took our chance of being wrong or inadequate, if we looked at things simply and directly, having in mind only our intention of finding out what they really are, not the prestige of our great intellectual act of looking at them. He liberates us. He tells us that we can understand our political and social life merely by looking around us; he frees us from the need for the inside dope. He implies that our job is not to be intellectual, certainly not to be intellectual in this fashion or that, but merely to be intelligent according to our own lights—he restores the old sense of the democracy of the mind, releasing us from the belief that the mind can work only in a technical, professional way and that it must work competitively. He has the effect of making us believe that we may become full members of the society of thinking men. That is why he is a figure for us.”

“George Orwell and the politics of truth,” The Opposing Self (1950), pp. 156-158
The Opposing Self (1950)

“We have all in some degree become anarchistic.”

Introduction
The Portable Matthew Arnold (Viking Press, 1949)

“Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.”

Lionel Trilling libro The Liberal Imagination

F. Scott Fitzgerald http://fitzgerald.narod.ru/critics-eng/trilling-fsf.html
The Liberal Imagination (1950)

“We are all ill; but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health.”

Lionel Trilling libro The Liberal Imagination

Art and Neurosis
The Liberal Imagination (1950)

“It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.”

"The Novel Alive or Dead," A Gathering of Fugitives: New Essays (1956)

“There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.”

Lionel Trilling libro The Liberal Imagination

The Function of the Little Magazine
The Liberal Imagination (1950)

“The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.”

Lionel Trilling libro The Liberal Imagination

Freud and Literature
The Liberal Imagination (1950)

“Everything which the economist takes from you in the way of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth.”

Lionel Trilling libro Sincerity and Authenticity

Origine: Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), p. 123

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