Sincerity and Authenticity

by Lionel Trilling

Overview

“Now and then,” writes Lionel Trilling, “it is possible to observe the moral life in process of revising itself.” In this new book he is concerned with such a mutation: the process by which the arduous enterprise of sincerity, of being true to one’s self, came to occupy a place of supreme importance in the moral life—and the further shift which finds that place now usurped by the darker and still more strenuous modern ideal of authenticity. Instances range over the whole of Western literature and thought, from Shakespeare to Hegel to Sartre, from Robespierre to R. D. Laing, suggesting the contradictions and ironies to which the ideals of sincerity and authenticity give rise, most especially in contemporary life.

Lucid, and brilliantly framed, its view of cultural history will give Sincerity and Authenticity an important place among the works of this distinguished critic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674808614
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	10/01/1973
Series:	The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures , #31
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.38(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

At the time of his death in 1975, Lionel Trilling was University Professor at Columbia University.

Table of Contents

1. Sincerity: Its Origin and Rise

2. The Honest Soul and the Disintegrated Consciousness

3. The Sentiment of Being and the Sentiments of Art

4. The Heroic, and Beautiful, and Authentic

5. Society and Authenticity

6. The Authentic Unconscious

Reference Notes

Index of Names

Editorial Reviews

Sincerity and Authenticity is not only about literature but is a literary performance itself. From page to page, Trilling expresses and articulates complex movements of thought and feeling through his modulated style, the dialectical structure and rhythm of his sentences and paragraphs. In this book, as in others, he writes to advance an argument and to resist and revise it—and, in the process, to trouble and complicate our responses as readers.

Society - William E. Cain

A beautifully written book, its tone admirably judged and perfectly sustained… It is wide, fastidious, and deeply thoughtful in its range of reference…Temperate, controlled and delicately scrupulous, it is a tribute if ever there was one to the ‘honest consciousness.’

Times Literary Supplement