Literary Discussions

Lionel Trilling offers the literary imagination as a cure for the simplifications of the liberal imagination.  In the preface to The Liberal Imagination he contrasts the "primal imagination" of liberalism with its "present particular manifestations."  The function of the literary imagination in the American present is the work of retrieval, "to recall liberalism to its first essential imagination of variousness and possibility."  Trilling's essentialism is part of the generally idealist tendency of his thought.  The story he has to tell is of a fall from a Platonic idea of liberalism to a corrupted political embodiment.  The literary imagination will help to restore liberalism to its original, pure form.  But, really, given Trilling's idealism, any political embodiment would represent a fall.  It follows from this purism that the function of criticism is literally to "refine" liberalism, to clear away the material dross of Stalinism and progressivism. - from Mark Krupnick, "Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism", Northwestern University Press, pg. 64, ISBN 0-8101-0713-9pr, Copyright 1986