ABSTRACT
In Modernity and its Discontents, a British television series first screened in 1985, Michael Ignatieff led into one of the discussions this way: Perhaps the most painful price they have had to pay is the loss of community and neighbourhood. The decline of positive community which, as Ignatieff confirms, is a pervasive contemporary theme, is shadowed by a realization that individualism, the alternative for which community is invariably given up, is also in deep trouble. The terrain of post-modernist politics and culture is treacherous. In 1961 Lionel Trilling's essay, On the Teaching of Modern Literature', appeared in Partisan Review, and in 1965 was reprinted in his Beyond Culture. Trilling had been exercised by the seemingly minor task of having to teach modern literature course at Columbia University. Students of literature might be aware of the ways in which American literary critics, like J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, and Paul de Man have extended and modified the deconstructive criticism of Jacques Derrida.
