Lionel trilling biography

We live in a period in which much academic literary criticism tends to be obscure and remote.

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Lionel Mordecai Trilling was an American literary critic, short story writer, essayist, and teacher.

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Lionel Trilling was an American literary critic and teacher whose criticism was informed by psychological, sociological, and philosophical methods and.

Biography.

Most academics write for other college professors, and their essays are often filled with professional jargon and favor fashionable, if sometimes transitory, approaches to understanding literature like structuralism or deconstruction.

This was not always the case.

In the 1950s Lionel Trilling was America’s most esteemed literary critic.

His writing appeared regularly in the non-academic press, and his readership extended far beyond the narrow world of academia. Trilling’s writing was elegant and intricate but always clear and devoid of jargon. Hence, he was able to influence not only other critics but large numbers of lay readers.

In this way, he persuaded educated members of the general public to read high-brow modernist authors like James Joyce and William Butler Yeats and less venerated if more traditional poets, novelists, and essayists like Matthew Arnold, E.

M. Forster, and George O