From the New Yorker:
In the postwar period, a generation of critics, inspired by Lionel Trilling, encapsulated the difference between high art and popular art in a single word: “complexity.” “Literature,” Trilling wrote, “is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity and difficulty.” Henry James, Austen, Coleridge, and Shakespeare (“King Lear” was the pinnacle of Trilling’s qualities), not to mention modernists from Proust to Kafka, from Woolf to Celine: their books are sanctuaries of anti-closure and infinite perspective, of right and wrong mashed together and dissolved. Following the endless turbulent commentary on Dylan Farrow and Woody Allen, and the commentary on the commentary, you could be forgiven for feeling that literary art, as Trilling defined it, has been largely displaced by life—or, at least, by the pictures of life ceaselessly produced by the all-powerful media—as the realm in which we lose ourselves in a moral problem....MORE
