Lionel Trilling: the work of liberation

Abstract

Daniel T. O'Hara reads the career of Trilling as a single, completely conmprehensive work of self-fashioning. The intention of such work, says O'Hara, from the beginning and throughout Trilling's intelectual life, was to create a self that, when confronted with the great achievement of another mind, was capable of imaginative sympathy and not solely resentful critique. In order to reach that goal, however, Trilling had to adopt on e of the conventional masks available to the intellectual in modern culture and adapt it to his needs and to those of his liberal time.