Abstract

Is Literature Possible?
Trilling, Lionel | October 15, 1930 issue

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The criticism of American literature has successively occupied four main positions. Firstly, the declaration of the non-existence of any literature worth name, secondly the acclamation of a new literature, fresh in kind and spirit, third, an immaturity and insufficiency in the new writers and lastly a sociological explanation of the failure of American writing and a prediction of the inevitable doom of all American art. The hope of the last generation, that the machine would make for a great improvement in human life has ended in disappointment. That the machine, far from raising the plane of human life, exercises an intolerably tyranny over it has become one of the commonplaces of modern thought.

See Also:

AMERICAN literature; CRITICISM; STYLE, Literary; ART, American; AUTHORS; SOCIOLOGY
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