Page 133 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 11: Freud and Literature—Lionel Trilling: Detailed Study

of human feeling and imagination. The study of literature might help to correct this tendency. Notes
Trilling had found an understanding of the tie between moral principles and the imagination
in the English novelist E.M. Forster, the subject of a book Trilling published in 1943. But the
first full development of his views on the relations between politics and the imagination
appears in The Liberal Imagination, which drove his views home and had an effect no less
than national. Insofar as liberalism depends on a belief that the primary political reality is
realized in individual human beings, could Americans be called "liberal" when we substituted
abstract zeal for an awareness of our existing human situation? Trilling's most concise
treatment of this contradiction comes from an introduction to his novel, The Middle of the
Journey: "This negation of the human situation was one aspect of an ever more imperious
and bitter refusal to consent to the conditioned nature of human existence."
• The volume opens with essays on minor American writers and then moves with greater
power and interest to a theme Trilling commanded, "Freud and Literature," and thereafter to
the authority of the great essays of the 1940s and 1950s, "Manners, Morals and the Novel"
and "Art and Fortune." Along the way current concerns are visited, as in the essay on The
Kinsey Report, which deals with prevailing attitudes toward sexuality, and a study of
current little magazines, including Partisan Review. All in all, the collection announced and
established a new critical eminence among us and was an enormous success. (Though it was
of greatest value, perhaps, to those whom it led to take a continuing interest in Trilling's
works, many such readers eventually came to cherish his later works more.)

11.3 Key-Words

1. Oedipus complex : A reference in Freud’s theory to the unconscious wish of every (male)
child to have sex with its mother and to eliminate its father.
2. Phallus : A term in psychoanalytic theory for the authority invested in the male. In
Lacan it is the symbol of power associated with ‘the law’ of the male
penis. It is rather the signifier of sexual difference in general.

11.4 Review Questions
1. What does this Lionel Trilling quote mean in relation to the novel 1984.
2. What is the ID?
3. Discuss Trilling’s Freud and Literature.
Answers: Self-Assessment
1. (i)(b) (ii)(d) (iii)(c) (iv)(c)
11.5 Further Readings

1. Hutcheon, Linda A poetics of postmodernism, London: Routledge, 1988.
2. Kennedy, X.J., Dana Gioia, Mark Bauerlein, Handbook of Literary Terms:
Literature, Language, Theory, 1st edition, New Delhi: Pearson, 2007.
3. Lodge, David (ed.) Twentieth Century Literary Criticism, London: Longman,
1972.
4. Rice, Philip and Patricia Waugh (eds.) A Modern Literary Theory: A Reader, 3rd
edition, London: Arnold, 1999.
5. Sethuraman, V.S. and Ramaswamy (eds.) The English Critical Tradition, Volume
II, New Delhi, Macmillan, 1977.
6. Seturaman, V.S. (ed.) Contemporary Criticism: An Anthology, New Delhi:
Macmillan, 2008.

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