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Title: The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays by Lionel Trilling, Leon Wieseltier ISBN: 0-374-52799-7 Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux Pub. Date: 17 October, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.17 (6 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Philosophy for the reader of "ordinary strong intelligence"
Comment: I'm an English major, and last year, in my third year of university (I'm 27, however), I purchased this book, struck by
the title. I'd read a couple of Trilling's essays several years
earlier and liked them, but I was put off by his tendency to relate literature to moral and political issues. "Boring," I
thought, having had my ideas of art formed in high school by Oscar Wilde and, later, Camille Paglia. But I've become more
open-minded since then, and when I started reading this book I
couldn't put it down--I read 80% of it in one weekend of doing
nothing else and the rest of it by the end of the month.
Trilling is a fantastic essay-writer who knows how to draw the
reader in with his rhetoric and draw everything towards a
resounding, moving climax. Most of the essays in this collection
are less works of criticism than erudite ruminations to which
Trilling has been moved by specific works of literature or by
considering literature as a whole. He comes up with simply
fascinating, extremely suggestive ideas; for example, in "The
Fate of Pleasure," one of my favourite essays in the volume, he
suggests that pleasure has fallen out of favour in the modern era. Like many of his other intriguing ideas, it is the sort of
thing that rings generally true without really being susceptible
to proof; nor is Trilling that great at arguing his positions or
even defining his terms. However, he offers lucid and passionate
discussions of ideas, drawn from his study of literature, that
are generally only found in dry or head-breakingly difficult
philosophical works. These are essays for the dabbler in philosophy, but that's not to belittle them: in one of the essays
Trilling complains that in the modern era (naturally) philosophy
has become a subject for specialists rather than for the person of "ordinary strong intelligence" (I'm quoting from memory, but that's the idea). Even if he's not always successful in focussing his argument or proving his thesis, he'll start your
mind going on broad, fascinating topics (pleasure, the abyss,
the will, "being," "mind"), and you can pursue the ideas in greater detail on your own, at your leisure. Also, like Camille
Paglia and Harold Bloom, Trilling loves to play the devil's advocate, and he therefore loves to criticize liberalism although he was himself a passionate liberal. This will probably
give him an unfortunate appeal for conservatives, but the people
who will get most out of the book are liberals who enjoy having
their assumptions questioned. That constant questioning of his
own assumptions, when they are shared by the reader, is one of
the things that makes Trilling such an electrifying writer.
Rating: 3
Summary: Good, but not up to the hype
Comment: I read numerous glowing reviews of Trilling's work in the press, and so was eager to get this book. But the book itself was something of a let-down. Trilling is said to be "brave" simply for observing that certain left-wing novelists of the 1930s weren't very good writers: but no one today reads these novelists outside of graduate seminars on 1930s literature. It is more an indictment of that decade that they were ever taken seriously rather than evidence of Trilling's brilliance. Similarly, Trilling now seems almost quaintly naive in taking Freud to be irrefutable Science, and his dicta about what "modern men" can and cannot take seriously seems very dated. What I found most interesting in Trilling's criticism was his effort to capture and convey the "course" of literature, to understand what is "happening" in our novelists and what that implies about the society out of which novelists write. But in the end, Allen Tate's Essays of Four Decades seems--to me, at least--to have held up better over the years. If you are interested in "classic" criticism from the middle decades of the twentieth century, I would look there.
Rating: 5
Summary: But are we obliged to be intelligent?
Comment: Our literature choices is one of the vehicles where we can show how intelliigent we are. But, a quick glance to the charts shows well, other choices. Trillings book demostrate that we do not have the choice of NOT being intelligent; we have to understand the beauty and the complexity of different authors and enjoy throughly the experience of life.
But, how can we judge other's choices? We are opinionated, and that is fine, because we have the base to explain our own catalog of likeness, but the world continue to turn wtihout the population reading Ulysess, Pride & Prejudice, The Turn of the Screw or any other work of art of the sort.
We do not have the obligation, but Trillings shows us that it is much better to be intelligent, to read books that will have more questions than answers, more ways than dead ends.
Excellent essasys, that permits an approach to the magical world of exquisite literature
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Title: Sincerity and Authenticity (Harvard Paperbacks) by Lionel Trilling ISBN: 0674808614 Publisher: Harvard University Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 1982 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Why Read the Classics? by Italo Calvino ISBN: 0679743499 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 December, 2000 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: A Jacques Barzun Reader : Selections from His Works (Perennial Classics) by Jacques Barzun ISBN: 0060935421 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 08 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: A Company of Readers : Uncollected Writings of W. H. Auden, Jacques Barzun, and Lionel Trilling from the Reader's Subscription and Mid-Century Book Clubs by Arthur Krystal, W. H. Auden, Jacques Barzun ISBN: 0743202627 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 01 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: The Middle of the Journey (New York Review Books Classics Series) by Lionel Trilling, Monroe Engel ISBN: 1590170156 Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: 01 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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