Lionel Trilling

Although The Great Gatsby was not well received when it was published, it should still be regarded as an American classic. In the 1920s, also known as the Roaring Twenties, America underwent a social transformation that led to an increase in immoral values. Fitzgerald writes with the purpose to exhibit something that many viewed too direct at time, yet something that people can learn from in the present and future years. By Fitzgerald writing a critique of the American Dream, readers also felt…

He is extremely dispirited with this thought. He is caught in the pangs of alienation. A dictionary of literary terms defined alienation as; ‘Alienation is the state of being alienated or being estranged from something or somebody; it is a condition of the mind’. Encyclopedia Britannica defines alienation as ‘the state of feeling estranged or separated from ones milieu, work, products of work or self. Different interpreters of alienation have given different definitions. According to Arnold…

This book is the truth about how America once was. The great Lionel Trilling once stated, “The truth of huck finn is of different kind from that of tom sawyer. It it more intense truth, fiercer and more complex”(Trilling 319). Trilling doesn't think the book is right for the use of racial slur, but he doesn't think it's wrong for the slur, he knows it the truth of America's cloudy past time. But…

Solomon, Jeff. “Capote and the Trillings: Homophobia and Literary Culture: At Midcentury.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 54, no. 2, 2008, pp. 129-165, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20479846. Accessed 21 Feb. 2017. The Trillings are a couple that have a very powerful voice in New York in the 1940s. Capote sees them at Grand central Station and he “’wanted to know why it was that Lionel had ignored Forster's homosexuality. Now this was not only a bold question to put at the top of his shrill…

As stated by Lionel Trilling, a leading American critic of the twentieth century, The Great Gatsby “comes inevitably to stand for America itself”. Written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the novel describes a poignant love story of Jay Gatsby, who devotes his entire life acquiring wealth and status to win back his lost love, Daisy Buchanan. The Great Gatsby is often considered as a “Great American Novel”, though other opinions are present as well. Some critics despise the book for its deficient…

“A writer’s technique is actually the means by which he discovers, objectifies, explores and evaluates his subject, and his technical dexterity determines his success”---Mark Schorer This chapter undertakes to make a detailed examination of all the narrative techniques present in the two novels, Wuthering Heights and The God of Small Things. The novel, as an established cultural institution has over the last two hundred years become the most significant and dominant form of literary writing…

Finn, T.S. Eliot, and Lionel Trilling, think of the novel as a “masterpiece.” Trilling says it is “One of the world’s great books and one of the central documents of American culture” (Apstein). It is hard not to agree with their opinions, with the great information The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn provides for the readers. Critics are used to make books and novels look good and have good reports about them so that people will want to read them. In this case, Eliot and Trilling are commenting…

Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn twenty years after slavery was abolished, but there was still a great controversy about whether it was racist. Some schools have even gone as far as removing the novel from their school curriculums because of its strong language and the supposed racism. Schools should include The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in their curriculums because it teaches the students an exceptional amount of history about slaves and their time period. The students…

While reading the article entitled “Unless You’re Oprah, ‘Be Yourself’ Is Terrible Advice” by Adam Grant, I found that I was immediately drawn to it because I agreed with many of the concepts Grant addressed. To be honest, I did not realize what a commonly used phrase “be yourself” was, and still is, until he pointed it out. Grant points out that while most people claim honesty and authenticity is the best policy, when this theory is actually put into use the negative effects of the two can be…

A wise man, John Galsworthy, once said that "the beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy." Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn serves as a magnificent example of untidy endings. Many presented their cases for and against the method in which Twain ended his literary masterpiece. While the ending seems out of place from the previous chapters because of the unnecessarily complicated prison break and moral childishness, the closing chapters actually propel the novel…