The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling’s essays examine the promise —and limits—of liberalism, challenging the complacency of a naïve liberal belief in rationality, progress, and the panaceas of economics and other social sciences, and asserting in their stead the irreducible complexity of human motivation and the tragic inevitability of tragedy. Only the imagination, Trilling argues, can give us access and insight into these realms and only the imagination can ground a reflective and considered, rather than programmatic and dogmatic, liberalism. Writing with acute intelligence about classics like Huckleberry Finn and the novels of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also on such varied matters as the Kinsey Report and money in the American imagination, Trilling presents a model of the critic as both part of and apart from his society, a defender of the reflective life that, in our ever more rationalized world, seems ever more necessary—and ever more remote.
The Liberal Imagination - Essays on Literature and Society
Lionel Trilling
New York Review of Books
2008
303 páginas
10h 6m
ISBN-13: 9781590172834
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Lionel Mordecai Trilling
O destacado crítico literário americano graduou-se e obteve o título de mestre na Universidade de Columbia, onde lecionou por toda a carreira acadêmica. Também esteve na Universidade de Harvard como professor visitante. Foi casado com a escritora e crítica literária Diana Trilling, e juntos integraram The New York Intellectuals, de que também participaram Hannah Arendt, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol e Saul Bellow, entre outros. Mais tarde, tornou-se um crítico da chamada New Left (Nova Esquerda). Assinou o marcante e influente prefácio da primeira edição americana de Homage to Catalonia, que George Orwell escreveu a partir de suas experiências e observações na Guerra Civil Espanhola.
6 Livros
2 Seguidores
New York , Estados Unidos da América