Some people would choose James Wood as the best living literary critic. But I’d put my money on young Adam Kirsh. Kirsh’s latest book, Why Trilling Matters not only defends Lionel Trilling’s literary legacy, but Kirsh manages to perform a virtuoso performance of criticism. It’s hard to believe that Trilling was considered one of the greatest literary critics back in the 1960s. Today, Trilling seems to be forgotten. Yet Adam Kirch explores Trilling’s works in this slim volume and shows that Trilling’s classic, The Liberal Imagination, merits reading (and rereading). You’re not going to read a more persuasive, informative, and lucid book of literary criticism anytime soon. GRADE: A
As I sit here typing, I am within six feet of a shelf of books retained from my long-ago college days. These include a two-volume THE OXFORD ANTHOLOGY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE edited by (among others) Frank Kermode, Harold Bloom, and (ta-da) Lionel Trilling. I don’t know about today, but he certainly mattered back when I was in college.
Lionel Trilling was a giant of literary criticism, Deb. I’m a fan of Frank Kermode, too! Sadly, only Facebook and Twitter seem to matter today.
Post-modern criticism pretty much ended all that came before it. But it’s not just the critics that are forgotten, so are the mid 20th Century novelists, he critiqued. Who reads Bellow or Malamud or any of them now? We still have a few of his books on the shelf but only out of habit. He was considered to be immortal before the French wave changed it all.
You’re right, Patti. Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson were enormously important U.S. literary critics. But that’s all over, now.
I hate post-modern criticism.
And stay off my lawn!
😉
I read a ton of Wilson and some of Trilling too, back in the days when I read a lot of literary criticism.
I agree with you on post-modern criticism, Jeff. It’s full of jargon and poorly written. But that’s the name of the game in today’s English Departments.
I still have my copy of THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION as well as a three-volume anthology edited by Trilling with his commentary. I thing it’s great stuff. But then I’m a dinosaur.
I’m a dinosaur, too, Bill. Trilling was a brilliant writer. He always had something interesting to say.
I am thinking it’s about time for the post-modernism to fade away as a new method of criticism takes its place. Who knows what, but something.
I’d vote for lucid prose and insightful analysis in literary criticism, Patti. Adam Kirsch delivers a fine example of it in WHY TRILLING MATTERS.
Hey George, hope you’re well. Your opinion on English departments was pointed but accurate. I was wondering if you ever get any feedback from your colleagues after making such comments? Or are they not even paying attention?
Most of my colleagues are addicted to watching Tim Tebow win in unlikely fashions, Drongo. The Bills play the Broncos on Christmas Eve. Many of my colleagues are trying to convince me to go to the game with them. Criticism of contemporary critical analysis tends to be ignored by the practitioners.
1) Your last sentence confirms what I half-suspected.
2) It took me a while before I realized that Tebow had become a big story outside of Denver
and the Gator Nation. Thought we had him all to ourselves…
Tebow and the Broncos face a big test against the Patriots, Drongo. The game against the Bills will be anti-climatic.