I'd propose a moratorium on decade analysis—except that Morris Dickstein's Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression proves the value of the exercise in certain special cases…engaging and perceptive …Dancing in the Dark is old-school cultural history, with a whiff of Matthew Arnold and the best that has been thought and said.
Mr. Dickstein remains a serious and perceptive critic…adept at observations both macro…and micro.
The gloom of the Depression fed a brilliant cultural efflorescence that's trenchantly explored here. Dickstein (Gates of Eden), a professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, surveys a panorama that includes high-brow masterpieces and mass entertainments, grim proletarian novels and frothy screwball comedies, haunting photographs of dust bowl poverty and elegant art deco designs. He finds the scene a jumble of fertile contradictions—between outward-looking naturalism and introspective modernism, social consciousness and giddy escapism, a hard-boiled, increasingly desperate individualism and a new vision of singing, dancing, collective solidarity—which somehow cohered into “extraordinary attempts to cheer people up—or else to sober them up.” Dickstein's fluent, erudite, intriguing meditations turn up many resonances, comparing, for example, the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will to Busby Berkeley musicals and Gone with the Wind to gangster films. While tracing the social meanings of culture, he stays raptly alive to its aesthetic pleasures, like the Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers collaboration, which expressed “the inner radiance that was one true bastion against social suffering.” The result is a fascinating portrait of a distant era that still speaks compellingly to our own. 24 illus. (Sept.)
Just in time for our own era's economic collapse, a literary critic looks back at the unusually rich art of the 1930s. In this scholarly yet immensely readable study, Dickstein (English/CUNY; A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature in the Real World, 2005, etc.) examines how the artistic culture of the '30s served a dual function. It helped people understand and cope with the terrible economic climate, and it allowed them to escape, for a while at least, the burden of dark times. The books, music, photos, movies, plays and dances of the period both reflected and influenced the decade's unique state of mind. These wide-ranging works of art include the novels of John Steinbeck, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright and Henry Roth, and the photographs of Margaret Bourke-White and Walker Evans, which turned an unprecedented spotlight on America's poor and disenfranchised. Artists like Nathanael West, James T. Farrell, John Dos Passos and F. Scott Fitzgerald "emphasize[d] the limitations and distortions of the American Dream," even as Cagney's gangster films and Busby Berkeley's backstage musicals reinvented rags-to-riches fantasies. At a time when audiences made room simultaneously for social relevance and artistic escape, singers as disparate as Bing Crosby and Woody Guthrie had a place. The big bands of Ellington and Goodman, the romantic comedies of Hawks and Capra, the dancing of Astaire and Rogers and the music of Porter and Gershwin all supplied a touch of class for the masses. Whether discussing Citizen Kane or Porgy and Bess, the poetry of Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams or Robert Frost, Faulkner's unique achievement and odd relation to the period, the films of Cary Grant or theelegance and energy of Art Deco, Dickstein always has something smart and lively to say. His scintillating commentary illuminates an important dimension of a decade too often considered only in political or economic terms. It's hard to imagine a more astute, more graceful guide to a remarkably creative period. Author tour to Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Denver. Film festival tie-in at Lincoln Center in New York
"The equivalent of a Fred and Ginger dance number…a thrill to read."
The equivalent of a Fred and Ginger dance number...a thrill to read.-- "NPR"
A significant historical work. A wonderful cultural historian, Morris Dickstein has written a book that lends testimony to the perseverance of the nation at that time.
Dickstein looks beyond the mainstream to the nation’s minorities, whose powerlessness made economic hardships even harder to bear, and he details the contributions of African Americans and immigrant Jews to American culture. Parallels to contemporary economic conditions mark this as an exceptionally relevant book.
Mark Knoblauch - Booklist
[A] bighearted, rambling new survey of American culture in the nineteen-thirties.... Dickstein...values the popular culture of the Depression, and writes with enthusiasm about Cole Porter’s wit, George Gershwin’s jazz cadences, and the racing stripes and shiny surfaces of Art Deco.
Caleb Crain - The New Yorker
[A] judiciously researched, persuasively argued, elegant analysis of Depression culture.... Dickstein is...exhaustive without being exhausting, and his book is a commendable compression of a complex decade.
Saul Austerlitz - Boston Globe
What will they be writing about our cultural endeavors 70 years from now? That’s the question that keeps coming up when you read Dancing in the Dark, Morris Dickstein’s fascinating examination of how the Great Depression influenced art, music, and literature.”
Dancing in the Dark is a book best read slowly, perhaps with a DVD player or YouTube close at hand, so that when Dickstein invokes Fred Astaire's "refusal to dance, and the very dance in which he acts this out" in Swing Time, you can see exactly what he means.... [a]s we again find ourselves whistling past the big, bad wolf of economic hard times, Dickstein reminds us of how much we owe the culture that taught all of us how to face the music and dance.”
D.D. Guttenplan - The Nation
Morris Dickstein achieves something so remarkable with Dancing in the Dark that it hovers close to the miraculous: He almost makes you wish you'd been living in America during the 1930s.”
[A] smart, ambitious piece of work, the product of prodigious research and careful thought, and those who read it will come away with a clearer understanding of an important but widely misunderstood period in the country's cultural life.
Jonathan Yardley - Washington Post Book World
A collection of thoughtfully linked essays on relatively few but exemplary works and their creators—novels, poems, plays, movies, art (both high and decorative) and music (both popular and classical) that defined the period between the Crash of 1929 and America's entrance into World War II. These admirably written pieces are marked by a generosity of spirit that never deteriorates into the quarrelsome or the niggardly, even when Dickstein does not fully endorse the objects he's discussing....Dickstein is terrific on all kinds of expression.
Richard Schickel - The Los Angeles Times
A tour de force of '30s culture, high and low. The writing is never less than scintillating, the interpretations bold and incisive, the range encyclopedic.... As timely and readable a book as any that will be published this year.
Dancing in the Dark is a book best read slowly, perhaps with a DVD player or YouTube close at hand, so that when Dickstein invokes Fred Astaire's "refusal to dance, and the very dance in which he acts this out" in Swing Time , you can see exactly what he means.... [a]s we again find ourselves whistling past the big, bad wolf of economic hard times, Dickstein reminds us of how much we owe the culture that taught all of us how to face the music and dance.— D.D. Guttenplan
Morris Dickstein achieves something so remarkable with Dancing in the Dark that it hovers close to the miraculous: He almost makes you wish you'd been living in America during the 1930s.— Gene Seymour
[A] bighearted, rambling new survey of American culture in the nineteen-thirties.... Dickstein...values the popular culture of the Depression, and writes with enthusiasm about Cole Porter’s wit, George Gershwin’s jazz cadences, and the racing stripes and shiny surfaces of Art Deco.— Caleb Crain
[A] judiciously researched, persuasively argued, elegant analysis of Depression culture.... Dickstein is...exhaustive without being exhausting, and his book is a commendable compression of a complex decade.— Saul Austerlitz
[A] smart, ambitious piece of work, the product of prodigious research and careful thought, and those who read it will come away with a clearer understanding of an important but widely misunderstood period in the country's cultural life.— Jonathan Yardley
Washington Post Book World
A collection of thoughtfully linked essays on relatively few but exemplary works and their creators—novels, poems, plays, movies, art (both high and decorative) and music (both popular and classical) that defined the period between the Crash of 1929 and America's entrance into World War II. These admirably written pieces are marked by a generosity of spirit that never deteriorates into the quarrelsome or the niggardly, even when Dickstein does not fully endorse the objects he's discussing....Dickstein is terrific on all kinds of expression.— Richard Schickel
Dickstein looks beyond the mainstream to the nation’s minorities, whose powerlessness made economic hardships even harder to bear, and he details the contributions of African Americans and immigrant Jews to American culture. Parallels to contemporary economic conditions mark this as an exceptionally relevant book.— Mark Knoblauch
The title refers to a Depression-era song that captured the zeitgeist of the New Deal society and culture. Focusing on the milieu of the 1930s, an art critic dwells on the enormous effect poverty and hopelessness made on American arts: films, novels, theater, and music. Dickstein provides examples from hundreds of sources, making peripatetic leaps through time as he pontificates. Narrator Malcolm Hillgartner inflects the narrative by nearly yelling at times and then dropping to a level that is barely audible. He does a Yiddish accent and reads complete lines of the language. After warming to Hillgartner’s turgid style, listeners may come to agree that he aptly reproduces the aesthetic changes Dickstein discusses in his gloomy Steinbeck-like portrayals of life and penury. J.A.H. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine
DECEMBER 2010 - AudioFile
