Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Sincerity and Authenticity

Sincerity and Authenticity

Trilling, Lionel

Paperback

Series: Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Book 31

PhilosophyLiterary CriticismGeneral Psychology

ISBN10: 0674808614
ISBN13: 9780674808614
Publisher: Belknap Press
Published: Oct 1 1973
Pages: 200
Weight: 0.52
Height: 0.49 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.20
Language: English

A powerful diagram of the moral life from Shakespeare to the present...a book crowded with insights.--Geoffrey Hartman, New York Times

One of the twentieth century's foremost literary critics traces the idea of the self across five hundred years of Western cultural history.

One cannot both be sincere and seem so, André Gide once wrote. Attempting to inhabit sincerity to satisfy social expectations makes it into a posture or a persona--a self-defeating enterprise. What, then, does the oft-repeated injunction to be yourself really mean?

In his 1969-1970 Norton Lectures, Lionel Trilling argues that this simple piece of advice has been the source of centuries of moral perplexity. In Elizabethan England, being true to oneself was seen as a means to an end. To thine own self be true, Polonius famously advised Laertes in Hamlet, And it must follow, as the night the day / Thou canst not then be false to any man. But this vision of the honest soul, whose pursuit of self-knowledge brings harmony with external society, gradually collapsed under the weight of modern literature and philosophy. Drawing a line from Rousseau, Robespierre, and Jane Austen through Hegel, Freud, and Joseph Conrad, Trilling brilliantly shows how sincerity was displaced by the more strenuous ideal of authenticity, in which genuine selfhood became a product of alienation and negation, a ceaseless purge of both social artifice and self-deception. In his final lectures, he presciently notes the rising embrace of deliberate inauthenticity, a development that rapidly accelerated after his death.

Moving fluidly between philosophy, literature, cultural history, and psychoanalysis, Sincerity and Authenticity is a bravura performance, unraveling our labors of self-definition with the wit and effortless sophistication that made Trilling a foremost literary critic of the twentieth century.

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