A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World

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Overview

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 nave 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 ...

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Overview

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 nave 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, Gnter Grass, Mary McCarthy, George Orwell, Philip Roth, and Gabriel Garca Mrquez. 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 essays probing the strengths and limitations of a historical approach to literature and criticism.

Editorial Reviews

Antioch Review
Dickstein wants to show that the real world counts, and suffuses fictions. . . . Weve learned . . . to see Stendhal better and to regard novels not so much as mirrors but as "prisms" with many facets that refract and refresh the world we know.
— Jay Martin
More Reviews (1) Fewer Reviews
From The Critics
A particular strength of this volume is its deft combination of historical and formal reading practices; Dickinson brings together literature's social and aesthetic registers to produce insightful discussion of canonical authors. . . . A strong contribution to American literary criticism.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780691130330
  • Publisher: Princeton University Press
  • Publication date: 2/5/2007
  • Edition description: New
  • Pages: 304
  • Product dimensions: 6.10 (w) x 9.20 (h) x 0.90 (d)

Meet the Author

Morris Dickstein
Morris Dickstein

Morris Dickstein is Distinguished Professor of English and Theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center and the author of Gates of Eden and Leopards in the Temple, among other works. He lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Introduction : a mirror in the roadway 1
The city as text : New York and the American writer 17
The Second City (Chicago writers) 36
Upton Sinclair and the urban jungle 41
A radical comedian (Sinclair Lewis) 51
The magic of contradictions : Willa Cather's lost lady 60
The authority of failure (F. Scott Fitzgerald) 77
Edmund Wilson : three phases 89
A glint of malice (Mary McCarthy) 96
Silence, exile, cunning 104
The modern writer as exile 104
An outsider in his own life (Samuel Beckett) 115
Kafka in love 119
Hope against hope : Orwell and the future 126
Magical realism 137
The pornography of power (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) 137
A fishy tale (Gunter Grass) 140
Talking dogs and pioneers (S. Y. Agnon) 144
Sea change : Celine in America 153
The complex fate of the Jewish American writer 168
The face in the mirror : the eclipse of distance in contemporary fiction 184
Ordinary people : Carver, Ford, and blue-collar realism 199
Textures of memory 209
Late Bellow : thinking about the dead 209
Saints and sinners : William Kennedy's Albany cycle 214
Damaged literacy : the decay of reading 223
Finding the right words (Irving Howe) 234
The social uses of fiction (Martha Nussbaum) 243
The limits of historicism : literary theory and historical understanding 248
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