Trilling Lectures On Honest Soul

Speaking last night in Lowell Lecture Hall, Lionel Trilling, this year's Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, contrasted the "honest consciousness" with the alienated soul which lacks "a self to be true to."

The lecture, entitled "The Honest Soul and the Disintegrated Consciousness," is the second of six lectures that Trilling, the noted critic, is delivering this spring. The lectures, which will be published later in a single volume by the Harvard University Press, concern the related topics. "Sincerity and Authenticity."

In last night's lecture. Trilling discussed Hegel's view of alienation as a forward step in man's development. Unlike the "intergrated soul" which submits "to the ethos imposed on him by society,... the disintegrated, alienated, distraught self" retains his free choice and "becomes truly objective," Trilling said.

The alienated soul must reject Shakespeare's "noble vision" of order, peace, honor, and beauty, he commented. "As readers, we strongly incline to [this] antagonistic view," he added.

Trilling announced that he will speak next week on the idea that art entails the "corruption of sincerity."