Books No Longer Express America's Soul | Louis Menand | Big Think

Books No Longer Express America's Soul

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The kind of literary criticism that Lionel Trilling practiced, which assumed that national literatures reflected deep national values, is dead now.

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Louis Menand:

Louis Menand is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard University. His areas of interest include 19th and 20th century cultural history. His books include the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Metaphysical Club" (2001), "Pragmatism: A Reader" (1996), and "Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context" (1987). His most recent volume, "The Marketplace of Ideas," was published by W. W. Norton & Co. in 2010. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker and contributes frequently to The New York Review of Books and other publications.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Is LionelrnTrilling still your model of a great critic, as he was when you started?

Louis Menand: Whenrn I was young, I went to college,rnhad a teacher who was, had been a student of Trilling’s at Columbia, rnthis wasrnin California. And he, I started readingrnhim around that time, and then I went to Columbia as well, Trilling was rnstillrnteaching there, I took a course with him. rnHe was not a great teacher, but he was, when I was younger, he rnwas arngood model for the kind of criticism I wanted to do, because he thought rnveryrndialectically. That is to say, herncould see in any particular cultural moment, things that were happening rnandrnthings that were going on that would undermine whatever was happening. He had a very good feel for howrncultural change takes place, and that’s a really complicated question rnthatrncriticism addresses, I think. Sornthat turn of mind that he had is something that really got me interestedrn inrnbeing able to write that way.

Now, I wouldn’t say he’s a model at all for me now,rn andrnprobably has not been somebody I’ve read for a very long time. But when I was young, that was kind ofrnwhat got me interested in doing this kind of writing.

Question: What is therncultural role of a literary critic now?

Louis Menand: Irn think in the, for most of the 20thrncentury, and certainly through the period when I was in school, print rnwas kingrnand literature was thought to be the essence of a society or a rncivilization’srnexpression of itself. You learnedrnFrench literature or you learned British literature or you learned rnAmericanrnliterature because that was a way of understanding that particularrnculture. And I think print is nornlonger king, no duh, and I also think that the idea that there’s such a rnthingrnas a national literature that’s somehow uniquely expressive of a rnnational soulrnor culture or mentality is probably also something that nobody really rnbelievesrnin anymore.

So the kind of criticism that a Trilling could rnpractice orrnan Edmund Wilson could practice in the 1940’s, 1950’s, is obsolete in rnthatrnsense.

Secondly, I think that when Trilling wrote the rnessays inrn“The Liberal Imagination,” which came out in 1950, he was writing for rneducatedrnpeople, most of them not academics, because the book was actually a rnbestsellerrnand bought by people far outside the academy. But it was a readership ofrn peoplernwho believed that your taste in literature or your taste in music or rnyour tasternin painting actually told people something about your values, in rnparticularlyrnyour political values. That’s whatrn“The Liberal Imagination,” that volume, is all about. Irn don’t think people believe that any more, I don’t thinkrnpeople think that it really matters whether you appreciate Henry James rnmorernthan Theodore Dreiser, to use an example that Trilling used, or whether rnyournprefer the Beatles to the Sex Pistols, or whatever the current version rnof thatrnargument is, I think people like to have the argument, but I don’t thinkrn theyrnthink a whole lot turns on which side you come out on.

So to that extent, the job of the critic, as it rnmight havernbeen conceived in the 1950’s or 1960’s, was some kind of role of moral rnarbiterrnfor people, not a huge number of people, but people who were, you know, rnfairlyrneducated, well-placed people. Irndon’t think anybody really thinks of critics as performing that functionrn anyrnmore.

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