{"title":"Trilling Unfinished","authors":"Michael Kalisch","doi":"10.1093/alh/ajad229","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This essay offers a close reading of Lionel Trilling’s unfinished second novel, The Journey Abandoned (2008). Drawing on Trilling’s essays and private journals, it considers how The Journey Abandoned’s unfinishedness speaks not only to some of the thematic preoccupations of the novel itself—a story of thwarted literary ambition and wasted creative talent—but also to some of the broader currents in Trilling’s thinking about his own literary ambition, the fate of the novel, and the institutionalization of literary studies at midcentury. If we think of the unfinishedness of The Journey Abandoned as integral rather than accidental to its form, we can begin to see how the text captures something of Trilling’s ambivalence about his relation to literature, an ambivalence that animated his criticism but seems to have ultimately forestalled his fiction.Whether he wished it to or not, unfinishedness became Trilling’s way of dramatizing the tensions and contradictions underwriting his conception of literary value and his sense of himself as a writer.","PeriodicalId":45821,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6000,"publicationDate":"2024-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajad229","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE, AMERICAN","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This essay offers a close reading of Lionel Trilling’s unfinished second novel, The Journey Abandoned (2008). Drawing on Trilling’s essays and private journals, it considers how The Journey Abandoned’s unfinishedness speaks not only to some of the thematic preoccupations of the novel itself—a story of thwarted literary ambition and wasted creative talent—but also to some of the broader currents in Trilling’s thinking about his own literary ambition, the fate of the novel, and the institutionalization of literary studies at midcentury. If we think of the unfinishedness of The Journey Abandoned as integral rather than accidental to its form, we can begin to see how the text captures something of Trilling’s ambivalence about his relation to literature, an ambivalence that animated his criticism but seems to have ultimately forestalled his fiction.Whether he wished it to or not, unfinishedness became Trilling’s way of dramatizing the tensions and contradictions underwriting his conception of literary value and his sense of himself as a writer.
期刊介绍:
Recent Americanist scholarship has generated some of the most forceful responses to questions about literary history and theory. Yet too many of the most provocative essays have been scattered among a wide variety of narrowly focused publications. Covering the study of US literature from its origins through the present, American Literary History provides a much-needed forum for the various, often competing voices of contemporary literary inquiry. Along with an annual special issue, the journal features essay-reviews, commentaries, and critical exchanges. It welcomes articles on historical and theoretical problems as well as writers and works. Inter-disciplinary studies from related fields are also invited.