Volume 5, Number 9 · December 9, 1965
Beyond Criticism
By Robert Mazzocco
Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning
by Lionel Trilling
Viking, 235 pp., $5.00
Beyond Culture is Lionel Trilling's first collection of essays in ten years. Three of these essays were published in the mid or the late 1950s, the remaining five date from the present period. A number have appeared in Partisan Review and the concluding one, 'The Two Environments,' recently printed in Encounter, created something of a stir. All are carefully composed, or over-composed, depending on how you view Professor Trilling's later prose style. I view it, unhappily, as a good deal more attenuated than what one found in The Liberal Imagination or The Opposing Self. Aside from an acute and amiable assessment of Babel's short stories, the usual impression is that of trudging uphill, scanning hazy vistas, martyred with abstractions, pestered by fuddy-duddy phrases: 'for such it can be called,' 'if we consent to call it that,' 'in the degree that,' and so on.
Review, 3418 words
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