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Lionel Trilling and the Institutionalization of Humanism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Michael E. Nowlin
Michael E. Nowlin
Affiliation:
Michael E. Nowlin is in theDepartment of English, University of California, Los Angeles, 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA90024, USA.
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Extract

Lionel Trilling is generally regarded as one of the most important American critics self-consciously indebted to Matthew Arnold's idea of critical humanism. But his legacy draws little interest now that humanism has presumably been “unmasked” in academic circles to reveal the various political agendas beneath its program of disinterested idealism. For many critics on the Left, he is remembered, in Cornel West's phrase, as “the godfather of neo-conservatism,” and perhaps a precursor of such recent advocates of the humanities as Allan Bloom and former Secretary of Education William Bennett. Much of this is doubtless due to Trilling's opposition to the general tenor of the 1960s counter-culture, some of whose participants are now today's academic cultural critics. But if Trilling is to be remembered as a kind of mandarin apologist for “high culture,” he should be remembered as a very troubled and ambivalent one.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , April 1991 , pp. 23 - 38
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

1 “From the Notebooks of Lionel Trilling,” in Partisan Review: The 50th Anniversary Edition (New York: Stein and Day, 1984), 26.Google Scholar

2 See West, Cornel, “Lionel Trilling: Godfather of Neo-Conservatism,” New Politics, 1 (1986), 233–42.Google Scholar Also see Jacoby, Russell, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Noonday Press, 1987), 77.Google Scholar

3 As Vincent Pecora has recently noted: “While Trilling coins the phrase ‘adversarial culture’ to address much later events, one can see that all of his meditations on this topic refer back to a peculiar Romantic conjunction of ideology, epistemology, and revolution” (“Adversarial Culture and the Fate of Dialectics,” Cultural Critique, 8 [1987–1988], 198).Google Scholar

4 Trilling, Lionel, “Preface” to Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (1965; rpt. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 3.Google Scholar

5 Ibid.

6 See Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 46.Google Scholar

7 See Althusser, Louis, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Brewster, Ben (New York & London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–86.Google Scholar

8 Trilling, , 4.Google Scholar

9 Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold, ed. Culler, A. Dwight (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 255.Google Scholar

10 Williams, Raymond's work Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1958; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963)Google Scholar remains a classic study of the English tradition of cultural criticism that deeply influenced Lionel Trilling. For Theodor W. Adorno's very challenging theoretical critique of this type of criticism, in the light of which it would be interesting to read much of Trilling's work, see his “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel, and Weber, Shierry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 19–34.Google Scholar

11 Trilling, Lionel, “The Situation of the American Intellectual at the Present Time,” in A Gathering of Fugitives (1956; rpt. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 78–79.Google Scholar

12 To prevent confusion, for the rest of the essay I, at least, will use either Trilling's term “the general culture,” or “the culture as a whole,” or more simply “society,” to designate “culture” as a totality embracing both social conditions and the ideological representation of those conditions. I will use the term “culture” mainly in the special sense of a critical and artistic enterprise purporting to resist or overcome the force of this “general culture.”

13 See “Our Country and Our Culture: A Symposium,” Partisan Review, 19 (05 1952), 282–326.Google Scholar For a concise historical overview, see Bloom, Alexander, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals & Their World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 177–79, 198–201.Google Scholar

14 It is unsettling to note, though, that Trilling, like his fellow symposium members (excepting Philip Rahv), represses the spectre of McCarthyism here. Looking back on the American intellectual climate of the 1950s in the opening chapter of his Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Trilling's younger colleague Richard Hofstadter assumes McCarthyism to have been one of the most formidable crises facing “intellectuals” in the early 50s. He does bear out Trilling's larger impression, however, when he suggests that “the resentment from which the intellectual has suffered in our time is a manifestation not of a decline in his position but of his increasing prominence” (Anti-Intellectualism in American Life [New York: Vintage, 1963], 6).Google Scholar

15 Trilling, , “The Situation of the American Intellectual at the Present Time,” 65.Google Scholar

16 Ibid., 67–68.

17 Ibid., 76.

18 Ibid., 71.

19 Ibid., 70.

20 West, , “Godfather of Neo-Conservatism,” 238.Google Scholar Also see 235.

21 Trilling, , “The Situation of the American Intellectual at the Present Time,” 74.Google Scholar

22 See Graff, Gerald, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).Google Scholar

23 Trilling, , “The Situation of the American Intellectual at the Present Time,” 75.Google Scholar

24 Ibid., 79.

25 Ibid., 83–84.

26 Trilling, Lionel, “On the Teaching of Modern Literature,” in Beyond Culture, 3.Google Scholar

27 Ibid., 12.

28 Ibid., 26–27.

29 Ibid., 27.

30 Ibid., 5.

31 Trilling, , “The Uncertain Future of the Humanistic Educational Ideal,” in The Last Decade: Essays and Reviews, 1965–75 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 161.Google Scholar

32 Ibid., 168–69.

33 Ibid. 171.

34 Ibid., 174. As Trilling noted in an earlier essay, “[a]dvertising joins forces with literature in agitating the question of who one is, of what kind of person one should want to be, a choice in which one's possessions and appearance, one's tastes, are as important as one's feelings and behavior” (“The Two Environments: Reflections on the Study of English,” in Beyond Culture, 194).Google Scholar

35 Adorno, , “Cultural Criticism and Society,” 19.Google Scholar