SOURCE: George, Diana L. “Thematic Structure in Lionel Trilling's ‘Of This Time, Of That Place’.” Studies in Short Fiction 13, no. 1 (winter 1976): 1-8.

In the following essay, George identifies the basic themes of “Of This Time Of That Place”—art and life, subjectivity and objectivity, science and morality—and investigates how they are connected to each other by a complex structure.

Lionel Trilling has favored his readers with generous explanations of the genesis and meaning of his short story “Of This Time, Of That Place”¹; yet the story is extraordinarily subtle, and its meanings are richer than Trilling and his critics have yet demonstrated. In his introduction to the story in his anthology, The Experience of Literature, Trilling explains his own conception of its primary purpose, which is to “present the sad irony of a passionate devotion to the intellectual life maintained by a person of deranged mind” (p...