Sincerity and Authenticity

By Lionel Trilling

Book Overview

"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," Andr 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674808614
• ISBN13: 9780674808614
• Release Date: February 2006
• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Subtle, nuanced intellectual and literary history

This book, based on lectures he gave at Harvard in 1970, is delight. Trilling draws a fine but deep distinction between two conceptions of selfhood. Sincerity, or being true to yourself with an eye to being true to others, was the dominant concern of Renaissance and early modern thought and literature, from Shakespeare to Rousseau. Beginning with Wordsworth, gaining momentum throughout the 19th century, and finally emerging with full force in the 20th, though, there is a new, more morally demanding ideal of being what or who one is, apart from all external conditions. Trilling's discussion wanders about quite freely, but his observations about literature and ideas are always brilliant and refreshing. Highly recommended.