關於本電子書
“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.
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.
為這本電子書評分
歡迎提供意見。
閱讀資訊
智慧型手機與平板電腦
筆記型電腦和電腦
你可以使用電腦的網路瀏覽器聆聽你在 Google Play 購買的有聲書。
電子書閱讀器與其他裝置
如要在 Kobo 電子閱讀器這類電子書裝置上閱覽書籍，必須將檔案下載並傳輸到該裝置上。請按照說明中心的詳細操作說明，將檔案傳輸到支援的電子閱讀器上。
