A Historical-Critical Account of American "High" Culture in the 20th Century

FAIN: FA-11040-75

Lionel Trilling
Columbia University (New York, NY 10027-7922)

To write an historical-critical account of certain crucial aspects of American "high" culture in this century. Trilling's first volume, The Liberal Imagination, 1950, dealt with the fact that the developing American intellectual class was in large part shaped and animated by its social and political predilections and was almost exclusively liberal. This work, again using 1950 as a median point, traces the process by which the intellectual class came to its positions in the 40s and 50s. Topics dealt with will include Freud, marxist ideology; the changing relation of the moral life to the experience of art; relation of the universities to the social and moral structure of our culture; and, value given or not given to an informed