Lionel Trilling Quotes About Literature

Quotes about: Literature

• The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.

  Lionel Trilling

  Acceptance, Self, Mutation

  1965 Beyond Culture, introduction.

• Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing - he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.

  Lionel Trilling

  Writing, Judging, Giving

  Lionel Trilling, Leon Wieseltier (2009). “The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays”, p.552, Northwestern University Press

• Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

  Lionel Trilling

  Literature, Possibility, Difficulty

  1950 The Liberal Imagination, preface.

• Even the nonreligious may exercise aesthetic judgment in matters of religion, and indeed our age has given the unbelieving a sophisticated taste in religious literature.

  Lionel Trilling

  Religious, Exercise, Age

  "The Portable Matthew Arnold " by Lionel Trilling, Viking Press, 1949.

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