ABSTRACT
In the 19505, when students at Columbia College first demanded a course in modem literature, Lionel Trilling and his colleagues were skeptical at best. Convinced that such study would contribute to the demoralization of the student body by institutionalizing the emergent "modem self-consciousness and the modern self-pity" (Trilling 6), and suspicious as to the true motivations of the students' request, the faculty resisted, wavered, but ultimately capitulated. Nevertheless-determined to save face-the department turned their ostensible defeat into "a ground for [their] display of a certain mean-spirited, last-ditch vindictiveness" (Trilling 7-8). Trilling explains:
What is remarkable about this admission (besides its candor) is not only that Trilling and his colleagues defined the modernist avant-garde solely in terms of "a number of Jsuperwriters'"
(Eysteinsson 88), but the fact that this selective list consisted entirely of literary men.
