Modernism in the Classroom: Lionel Trilling and the Experience of Literature

Abstract

This essay surveys the career of Lionel Trilling to understand why he uses the phrase “modernism in the streets” to critique the 1960s counterculture. It focuses on his role as a teacher in relation to his writings on higher education, testimonies from his former students, the emergence of critical theory, and his understanding of the experience of literature. At stake in studying Trilling’s shift from an early champion of the modern imagination to his later defense of the rational intellect is his fear of the university’s commodification of art and the erosion of the liberal arts humanistic ideal. This essay ultimately argues that Trilling’s career reimagines the function of literature in the humanist tradition to account for the modernist and theoretical critique of humanism. In doing so, Trilling revitalizes the usefulness of irony as a mode of self-creation and exemplifies a new model of sincerity that teachers can adopt when faced with the task of helping students navigate the tension between the excess of modern literature and the decorum necessitated by social institutions.