A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World by Morris Dickstein

From the Publisher

In a famous passage in The Red and the Black, the French writer Stendhal described the novel as a mirror being carried along a roadway. In the twentieth century this was derided as a naïve notion of realism. Instead, modern writers experimented with creative forms of invention and dislocation. Deconstructive theorists went even further, questioning whether literature had any real reference to a world outside its own language, while traditional historians challenged whether novels gave a trustworthy representation of history and society. In this book, Morris Dickstein reinterprets Stendhal's metaphor and tracks the different worlds of a wide array of twentieth-century writers, from realists like Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather, through modernists like Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett, to wildly inventive postwar writers like Saul Bellow, Günter Grass, Mary McCarthy, George Orwell, Philip Roth, and Gabriel García Márquez. Dickstein argues that fiction will always yield rich insight into its subject, and that literature can also be a form of historical understanding. Writers refract the world through their forms and sensibilities. He shows how the work of these writers recaptures--yet also transforms--the life around them, the world inside them, and the universe of language and feeling they share with their readers. Through lively and incisive essays directed to general readers as well as students of literature, Dickstein redefines the literary landscape--a landscape in which reading has for decades been devalued by society and distorted by theory. Having begun with a reconsideration of realism, the book concludes with several essaysprobing the strengths and limitations of a historical approach to literature and criticism.

Publishers Weekly

Beginning with how American writers like Whitman, Melville, Wharton, Ellison and Bellow variously depicted life in New York City, literary critic Dickstein (Gates of Eden) examines an array of authors in relation to their historical moments and explores the significance of how they represented their worlds. Dickstein, who openly expresses his reservations about poststructuralist and new historicist approaches to literary criticism, writes in what he calls a tradition that is intuitive, experiential, historicist and semi-sociological. A section on representations of Chicago compares Theodore Dreiser's canny social history of that city in Sister Carrie with Upton Sinclair's more crudely journalistic novel The Jungle. In additional essays Dickstein makes a case for the social awareness of F. Scott Fitzgerald's late, Depression-era writing, and reflects on the notion of alienation and on the enigmatic sensibilities of Kafka and Beckett. The author, a professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, is at his most persuasive when tracing the French writer CEline's influence on American black humorists of the '60s such as Philip Roth and when assessing the cultural forces that have shaped the styles of such American Jewish writers as Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Delmore Schwartz, Paul Goodman and I.B. Singer. Agent, Georges Borchardt. (June) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Twenty illuminating essays published over the decades on literature's elusive, prophetic interpretations of a changing American society. In his title piece, Dickstein (Distinguished Professor of English/CUNY Graduate Center; Double Agent: The Critic and Society, 1992, etc.) explains that the "mirror in the roadway" reflects Stendhal's metaphor in Le Rouge et le noir that a novel is like a mirror carried along a highway, sometimes reflecting the sky, sometimes the mud in the road-and consequently you can't blame the puddle for the mire but "the road inspector who lets the water stagnate and the puddle form." The novel has a social function, and Dickstein explores it, beginning with the early mythmakers of urban centers New York (Poe, Whitman, Dos Passos, Melville, James, Ellison) and "Second City" Chicago (Dreiser, Richard Wright, James T. Farrell, Bellow). In considering the rise of American Realism, he argues that Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) truly "changed the course of history," not only by exposing the unconscionable practices of the meat-packing industry, but also by revealing perhaps for the first time the "inner humanity of those trapped by birth or occupation near the bottom of the social hierarchy." Dickstein has a facile ability to convey the great swath of literary criticism in a most readable fashion, sans clunky jargon, such as in "Edmund Wilson: Three Phrases," where he explores the reasons this notably prickly critic continues to engage contemporary readers. Dickstein offers a cogent argument for reevaluating the work of Fitzgerald ("The Authority of Failure") as a writer whose "reverses" made him more introspective, as well as more interesting to read. Other authorsDickstein reevaluates, moving from realism to modernism, include Mary McCarthy, Kafka and Raymond Carver. Celine (thanks to a 1966 translation) receives credit for the explosion of American vernacular, while "The Complex Fate of the Jewish American Writer" is a most thoughtful essay on American identity. A fine, accessible collection worthy of Dickstein's former CUNY mentor, Irving Howe.

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Table of Contents