Or is it, *in* a letter? Valentine's Day - which Billy Bragg once called 'The 14th of February'. Does anyone remember that song? It was definitely a high point, a very high point, on his disappointing LP William Bloke. I do indistinctly remember spending past Valentines Days walking around provincial squares in rainy dreams of impossible romance. Funnily enough I have not done that today. Are my Valentine days over? Did they ever begin? It may be a blessing not to receive valentines. In which case, curse the sender of that electronic valentine thing I got earlier. At least I was apparently able to read it. I have been reading and thinking about Lionel Trilling, who taught at his alma mater Columbia University from 1932 and died in 1975, aged 70. His widow Diana lived till 1996, and wrote copious, or voluminous, or both varieties of, book reviews till not so long before her own demise. You can find info on her on the 'internet'. re. Trilling, I have been wondering about two things: 1. Why does his writing appeal to me in an age when it is so 'dated' - so much a voice from the past? Of course, the beginning of the answer is: *because* it's a voice from history. I have made some notes on this phenomenon. I wonder if anyone has anything else to say about it. A subsidiary question here is: does non-fictional writing become 'historical' in a different way from, or at a different rate from, literary work? 2. Trilling's theory of culture. It is not that easy to summarize right now, but it seems crucially to involve the idea that in modernity, the individual self is, even should be, almost irredeemably antagonistic to the 'culture' which has formed her - and of which she is 'inextricably' a part, save that her antagonism to it seems to produce a certain action of 'extrication'. For Trilling, the bulk of great modern literature testifies to this necessary, honourable antagonism between self and society, malcontent subject and social world. Here is a reservation. The basis of the self's 'opposition' to culture, for Trilling, seems often to be something innate - something irreducibly biological (as in his 1955 essay 'Freud: Within and Beyond Culture'), or a relatively abstract faculty of reason (as in his 1962 essay on Dr Leavis and Sir Charles Snow). Such forces, for Trilling, are just about the only imaginable bulwarks against what we might now call a strong culturalism - a sense that culture goes 'all the way down' and cannot be appealed or battled against. Yet - this, simply, is my reservation - are these pure, acultural forces really that convincing as forces against culture? Can we still muster much faith in them now? Reason is a fine thing, but we're used by now to stressing its 'situatedness' in cultural settings (as in, I think, the essay by Habermas, from ten years back or so, which is actually called 'Situating Reason' or some such - it's at the start of a book whose title has escaped me for a while). I think we have to find a way of thinking beyond the opposition: constraints of determining culture vs abilities of unconditioned mind. We might start by seeking a less monistic conception of culture as such - for it strikes me that Trilling shares a somewhat monistic conception of culture and its power over the individual with (of all people!) Stanley Fish. What do you think? __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail - only $35 a year! http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+