Page 119 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Gowher Ahmad Naik, Lovely Professional University Unit 10: Freud and Literature—Lionel Trilling: An Introduction

Unit 10: Freud and Literature—Lionel Trilling: An Introduction Notes

CONTENTS
Objectives
Introduction
10.1 Academic Life
10.2 Critical and Literary Works
10.3 Trilling Major Works
10.4 Summary
10.5 Key-Words
10.6 Review Questions
10.7 Further Readings

Objectives
After reading this Unit students will be able to:
• Know the Academic Life of Lionel Trilling.
• Discuss Critical and Literary Works.

Introduction

Lionel Mordecai Trilling (4 July 1905 - 5 November 1975) was an American literary critic, author,
and teacher. With wife Diana Trilling, he was a member of the New York Intellectuals and
contributor to the Partisan Review. Although he did not establish a school of literary criticism, he
is one of the leading U.S. critics of the twentieth century who traced the contemporary cultural,
social, and political implications of literature. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he has been a
subject of continued interest.
Trilling discusses the relationships that exist between Freud and literature. Beginning with the
statement that psychoanalysis may be viewed as a culmination of the nineteenth-century Romantic
movement in literature, Trilling develops a striking thesis that revolves around the delineation of
three Romantic hallmarks: devotion to research into the self, recognition of the hidden element in
human behavior, and the concept of the mind as a divisible entity. While all these items are
undoubtedly part of the Freudian base, Trilling suggests that Freud added a rationalistic anti-
Romantic construct to the system, viewing the final aim of psychoanalysis as control of the impulses-
- "where id was, there shall ego be." In critical, but not unsympathetic fashion, Trilling regards
Freud's views on the artist as somewhat narrow and undertakes at some length to reconcile
certain contradictions. A picture of the difference between the creative artist and the neurotic
ultimately emerges; the former in command of his fantasies, the latter possessed by them. Trilling
feels that Freud's conception of the mind as imagistic "naturalizes" poetry. The entire Freudian
depiction of the unconscious both opens and complicates the world for the artist, and Freudian
man is seen as a "creature of far more dignity and far more interest than the man which any other
modern system has been able to conceive--an inextricable tangle of culture and biology."
10.1 Academic Life

Lionel Trilling was born in Queens, New York City, the son of Fannie (née Cohen), who was from
London, and David Trilling, a tailor from Bialystok in Poland. His family was Jewish. In 1921, he
graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School, and, at age sixteen, entered Columbia University,

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 113