Sincerity and Authenticity Quotes

“Insanity is a direct and appropriate response to the coercive inauthenticity of society ... it is an act, expressing the intention of the insane person to meet and overcome to coercive situation; and whether or not it succeed in this intention, it is at least an act of criticism which exposes the true nature of society”
― Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity

“At the behest of the criterion of authenticity, much that was once thought to make up the very fabric of culture has come to seem of little account, mere fantasy or ritual, or downright falsification. Conversely, much that culture traditionally condemned and sought to exclude is accorded a considerable moral authority by reason of the authenticity claimed for it, for example, disorder, violence, unreason.”
― Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity

“It is the exceptional novelist today who would say of himself, as Henry James did, that he ‘loved the story as story’, by which James meant the story apart from any overt ideational intention it might have, simply as, like any primitive tale, it brings into play what he called ‘the blessed faculty of wonder’. Already in James’s day, narration as a means by which the reader was held spellbound, as the old phrase put it, had come under suspicion. And the dubiety grew to the point where Walter Benjamin could say some three decades ago that the art of story-telling was moribund. T. S. Eliot’s famous earlier statement, that the novel had reached its end with Flaubert and James, would seem to be not literally true; the novel does seem to persist in some sort of life. But we cannot fail to see how uneasy it is with the narrative mode, which once made its vital principle, and how its practitioners seek by one device or another to evade or obscure or palliate the act of telling.”
― Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity

“At the present moment, art cannot be said to make exigent demands upon the audience. That segment of our culture which is at all responsive to contemporary art is wholly permeable by it. The situation no longer obtains in which the experience of a contemporary work begins in resistance and proceeds by relatively slow stages to a comprehending or submissive admiration. The artist now can make scarcely anything which will prove really exigent to the audience, which will outrage its habitual sensibility. The audience likes or does not like, is pleased or not pleased—the faculty of ‘taste’ has re-established itself at the centre of the experience of art.”
― Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity

“...ο Έμερσον διατυπώνει πάλι εγκωμιαστικά λόγια σχετικά με την αυτονομία και την ειλικρίνεια των Άγγλων: " Απαιτούν να έχεις τη δική σου άποψη και να την υποστηρίζεις, και απεχθάνονται τους δειλούς που δεν μπορούνε, στα πρακτικά ζητήματα, να απαντούν με ένα ναι η με ένα όχι. Τολμούν να δυσαρεστούν, θα σου επιτρέψουν να παραβείς όλους τους κανόνες, να το κάνεις μονάχα ατοφιος και ψυχωμενος. Πρέπει να έχεις προσωπικότητα, μπορείς τότε να πράξεις είτε έτσι είτε αλλιώς, καταπώς θέλεις. ".”
― Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity