What's Worth Reading Today:

Michael Kimmage addresses Adam Kirsch's new book, Why Trilling Matters, in Thursday's New York Times book section and explains the importance of 1950s critic Lionel Trilling:

For literary criticism to have any kind of political application today, literature must first have cultural currency. Here optimists are in the minority. Kirsch’s originality lies in a refusal to equate the existing crisis — literature is “on the verge of default,” he readily admits — with a permanent condition. Contemplating “our unmistakably fragmented literary culture,” Kirsch posits a virtuous circle derived from Trilling’s example. Trilling was “always less concerned with writers than with readers,” he points out, and “less interested in the way novels work than in the way we put them to work in our own lives.” Entertainment is peripheral, if not antithetical, to the true experience of literature, and it is surely less exciting than “the drama of individuals shaping their ideals and morals in reaction to texts.” The critic lives the drama, creating heroic readers in the process, and it is these readers who unite author, text and audience in a prospering literary culture.

Just for the fun of it, I've been watching the 1950s TV western Have Gun, Will Travel recently, and the quoted comments above rang particularly relevant.