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REMARKABLY, IT HAS BEEN TWENTY-FIVE YEARS since Lionel Trilling's death, and even more remarkably, we still struggle to understand his legacy. For some literary critics, Trilling has come to represent the corrupt, conservative influence of the New York Intellectuals, the anti-Stalinist group of critics associated with the journal Partisan Review in the 1930's and 1940's. For instance, Barbara Foley suggests in Radical Representations that Trilling's "knee-jerk anti-Stalinism" led to a critical method where he used the categories of "spontaneity, complexity, and variety"-which he falsely labeled as apolitical-to condemn writers whose politics he opposed (Foley, 30).1 In contrast, for neo-conservative critics like Norman Podhoretz, Trilling was a critic who outlived his usefulness because he wasn't conservative enough, because he defended much of his supposedly more radical work in the thirties well into the 1960's.2 As Podhoretz complains in his memoir Breaking Ranks, Trilling suffered from a "failure of nerve" (296) in the 1960's, a failure which manifested itself in Trilling's "excessive deference to the [sixties] radicals and their ideas" (304).
Foley's and Podhoretz's complaints about Trilling reveal more about our own shortcomings than they do about Trilling's. In fact, our failure to make up our mind about Trilling emphasizes just how badly we still need him-not because he might serve as a political savior or scapegoat for the literary left or right, but because we are looking for a political savior or scapegoat in the first place. We need to re-examine Trilling's work not because he might serve as a badly needed corrective to the extremes of literary leftism or conservatism, but rather to remind us of the specific responsibilities of literary and cultural critics. Critics, as Trilling said repeatedly, have a responsibility to take a hard, unsentimental view of that "bloody crossroads where politics and literature meet" (The Liberal Imagination, 11). But critics, Trilling suggested, should do so not in hopes of finding a political prophet; rather, we should look to this crossroads in order t., see what literature does do, politically and aesthetically, so that we might know what it does not do.
Recent debates over the function of literary criticism and theory only prove how desperately we need to re-examine the work of Trilling. Consider, for instance, Richard Rorty's 1996 essay, "The Inspirational...