Page 120 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes thus beginning a perpetual association with the university. In 1925, he graduated from Columbia,
and, in 1926, earned a Master of Arts degree. He taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
and at Hunter College. In 1932, he taught literature at Columbia University. In 1938, he earned his
doctorate with a dissertation about Matthew Arnold, that he later published. In 1939, he was
promoted to assistant professor - the first tenured Jewish professor in the English department; in
1948, he was promoted to full professor. In 1965, he became the George Edward Woodberry
Professor of Literature and Criticism. Trilling was a popular instructor, and for 30 years taught,
with Jacques Barzun, Columbia's Colloquium on Important Books, a course about the relationship
between literature and cultural history. His students included Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac, Allen
Ginsberg, John Hollander, Cynthia Ozick, Carolyn Gold Heilbrun, Louis Menand, and Norman
Podhoretz. From 1969 to 1970 he was the Norton professor at Harvard University. In 1972 he was
selected by the National Endowment for the Humanities to deliver the first Jefferson Lecture in the
Humanities, described as "the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished
intellectual achievement in the humanities." Trilling served as a Senior Fellow of the Kenyon
School of English and subsequently as a Senior Fellow of the Indiana School of Letters.
In 1937, he joined the recently revived magazine Partisan Review, a Marxist, but anti-Stalinist,
journal founded by William Philips and Philip Rahv in 1934.
The Partisan Review was associated with the New York Intellectuals - Trilling, his wife Diana
Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Delmore Schwartz, William Phillips, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg,
Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, F. W. Dupee, Paul Goodman, Lionel Abel, Irving Howe,
Saul Bellow, Leslie Fiedler, Elizabeth Hardwick, Richard Chase, William Barrett, Daniel Bell,
Hannah Arendt, Isaac Rosenfeld, Susan Sontag, Steven Marcus, Norman Podhoretz, and Hilton
Kramer - who emphasised the influence of history and culture upon authors and literature. As
such, the New York Intellectuals distanced themselves from the New Critics, by concentrating
upon the socio-political ramifications of the discussed literature. In the preface to the essays
collection Beyond Culture (1965), he defends the New York Intellectuals: As a group, it is busy
and vivacious about ideas, and, even more, about attitudes. Its assiduity constitutes an authority.
The structure of our society is such that a class of this kind is bound by organic filaments to groups
less culturally fluent, which are susceptible to its influence.
Trilling, who became an associate professor at Columbia in 1945, was made a full professor in
1948, and thereafter achieved the University's highest honor, becoming a University Professor in
1970. He was awarded a number of honorary degrees by American institutions including Harvard,
Northwestern, Case Western Reserve, Brandeis and Yale; he also received Honorary Litt. D. degrees
from the universities of Durham and Leicester in England. He held the Eastman Professorship at
Oxford (1965) and was later appointed a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford (1972-73). In
1951, Trilling became a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and a Fellow of the
Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1972 he received the first Thomas Jefferson Award in the
Humanities. His lecture on that occasion was entitled "Mind in the Modern World."

10.2 Critical and Literary Works

Trilling wrote one novel, The Middle of the Journey (1947), about an affluent Communist couple's
encounter with a Communist defector. (Trilling later acknowledged that the character was inspired
by his Columbia College compatriot and contemporary Whittaker Chambers). His short stories
include "The Other Margaret." Otherwise, he wrote essays and reviews, in which he reflected on
literature's ability to challenge the morality and conventions of the culture. Critic David Daiches
said of Trilling, "Mr. Trilling likes to move out and consider the implications, the relevance for
culture, for civilization, for the thinking man today, of each particular literary phenomenon which
he contemplates, and this expansion of the context gives him both his moments of his greatest
perceptions, and his moments of disconcerting generalization."
Trilling published two complex studies of authors Matthew Arnold (1939) and E. M. Forster
(1943), both written in response to a concern with "the tradition of humanistic thought and the
intellectual middle class which believes it continues this tradition." His first collection of essays,

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