Series in By Century
Books in By Century
Sincerity and Authenticity
“A powerful diagram of the moral life from Shakespeare to the present...a book crowded with insights.”—Geoffrey Hartman, The New York Times One of the twentieth century’s foremost literary critics traces the idea of the self across five hundred years of Western cultural history. “One cannot both be sincere and seem so,” André Gide once wrote. Attempting to inhabit sincerity to satisfy social expectations makes it into a posture or a persona—a self-defeating enterprise. What, then, does the oft-repeated injunction to “be yourself” really mean? In his 1969–1970 Norton Lectures, Lionel Trilling argues that this simple piece of advice has been the source of centuries of moral perplexity. In Elizabethan England, being true to oneself was seen as a means to an end. “To thine own self be true,” Polonius famously advised Laertes in Hamlet , “And it must follow, as the night the day / Thou canst not then be false to any man.” But this vision of the “honest soul,” whose pursuit of self-knowledge brings harmony with external society, gradually collapsed under the weight of modern literature and philosophy. Drawing a line from Rousseau, Robespierre, and Jane Austen through Hegel, Freud, and Joseph Conrad, Trilling brilliantly shows how sincerity was displaced by the more strenuous ideal of authenticity, in which genuine selfhood became a product of alienation and negation, a ceaseless purge of both social artifice and self-deception. In his final lectures, he presciently notes the rising embrace of deliberate inauthenticity, a development that rapidly accelerated after his death. Moving fluidly between philosophy, literature, cultural history, and psychoanalysis, Sincerity and Authenticity is a bravura performance, unraveling our labors of self-definition with the wit and effortless sophistication that made Trilling a foremost literary critic of the twentieth century.
Sincerity and Authenticity
“A powerful diagram of the moral life from Shakespeare to the present...a book crowded with insights.”—Geoffrey Hartman, The New York Times One of the twentieth century’s foremost literary critics traces the idea of the self across five hundred years of Western cultural history. “One cannot both be sincere and seem so,” André Gide once wrote. Attempting to inhabit sincerity to satisfy social expectations makes it into a posture or a persona—a self-defeating enterprise. What, then, does the oft-repeated injunction to “be yourself” really mean? In his 1969–1970 Norton Lectures, Lionel Trilling argues that this simple piece of advice has been the source of centuries of moral perplexity. In Elizabethan England, being true to oneself was seen as a means to an end. “To thine own self be true,” Polonius famously advised Laertes in Hamlet , “And it must follow, as the night the day / Thou canst not then be false to any man.” But this vision of the “honest soul,” whose pursuit of self-knowledge brings harmony with external society, gradually collapsed under the weight of modern literature and philosophy. Drawing a line from Rousseau, Robespierre, and Jane Austen through Hegel, Freud, and Joseph Conrad, Trilling brilliantly shows how sincerity was displaced by the more strenuous ideal of authenticity, in which genuine selfhood became a product of alienation and negation, a ceaseless purge of both social artifice and self-deception. In his final lectures, he presciently notes the rising embrace of deliberate inauthenticity, a development that rapidly accelerated after his death. Moving fluidly between philosophy, literature, cultural history, and psychoanalysis, Sincerity and Authenticity is a bravura performance, unraveling our labors of self-definition with the wit and effortless sophistication that made Trilling a foremost literary critic of the twentieth century.
The Embodied Child: Readings in Children’s Literature and Culture
The Embodied Child: Readings in Children’s Literature and Culture brings together essays that offer compelling analyses of children’s bodies as they read and are read, as they interact with literature and other cultural artifacts, and as they are constructed in literature and popular culture. The chapters examine the ideology behind the cultural constructions of the child’s body and the impact they have on society, and how the child’s body becomes a carrier of cultural ideology within the cultural imagination. They also consider the portrayal of children’s bodies in terms of the seeming dichotomies between healthy-vs-unhealthy bodies as well as able-bodied-vs-disabled, and examines flesh-and-blood bodies that engage with literary texts and other media. The contributors bring perspectives from anthropology, communication, education, literary criticism, cultural studies, philosophy, physical education, and religious studies. With wide and astute coverage of disparate literary and cultural texts, and lively scholarly discussions in the introductions to the collection and to each section, this book makes a long-needed contribution to discussions of the body and the child.