A fine, accessible collection worthy of Dickstein’s former CUNY mentor, Irving Howe.
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 authors Dickstein reevaluates, moving from realism to modernism, include Mary McCarthy, Kafka and Raymond Carver. Céline (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.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-691-11996-1
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
A European woman who assumed the persona of a young male Tunisian student describes her remarkable journey into the Sahara in colorful and textured, albeit romanticized, vignettes. In 1897, Isabelle Eberhardt (The Oblivion Seekers, not reviewed), born and raised in Geneva, traveled with her mother to Tunis, where both converted to Islam. Eberhardt spent much of the rest of her life in Algeria; this work comes from notes she made during 1904 as they were later edited and published in France by Victor Barrucand. Despite this cleanup of the notes, some intriguing internal tensions remain: Eberhardt says her male persona (which Arabs respected, even when they saw through it) allows her to travel without attracting notice, but in a low moment she notes that she attracts disapproval. Near the Algeria-Morocco border, she muses with some pleasure that nobody knows precisely where the boundary is, yet soon (in one of the few hints at the region's volatility) she trades her Moroccan attire for Algerian to avoid annoying residents. When individuals and settings attract her eye she describes them vividly and concisely, whether she is passing a madman reciting verses from the Koran or taking tea with male students at a mosque. (Her garb ironically restricts her access to—and ability to learn about—women; interestingly, she seems not to mind.) Her observations on the play of light and color over the desert are made with an artist's eye, and her musings on travel and isolation reveal a pensive side. Yet far as she journeys, literally and metaphorically, she is still dogged by her prejudices: Jewish women cast ``provocative leers,'' and Jewish men possess ``insinuating and commercial abilities''; blacks can be ``repulsive'' and, when dancing, both ``childlike'' and ``barbarous.'' Though lacking a needed glossary for the many Arabic terms used, this slim volume makes a welcome addition to the information available on an extraordinary woman.
Pub Date: Oct. 5, 1994
ISBN: 0-7206-0889-9
Page Count: 120
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
The final third of this feminist literary study maintains the quality of volumes I (The War of the Words, 1987) and II (Sexchanges, 1989) as it looks at women writers' exploration of our century's complex and ever-shifting cultural scene, particularly the thorny question of gender. Gilbert and Gubar take a generally chronological approach, beginning with the modernists. In their analysis, Virginia Woolf sketched scenarios challenging traditional sex roles, as well as the historical settings and the social hierarchies in which they functioned. Edna St. Vincent Millay and Marianne Moore were ``female female impersonators'' who exploited femininity's artificiality in an imaginative but uncertainly empowering way. The authors then move on to the Harlem Renaissance, arguing that such writers as Nora Zeale Hurston, Jessie Redmon Faucet, and Nella Larsen worked to reveal the ``authentic (black) feminine'' behind racial stereotypes and criticized (white) feminism. Intertwining the poet and her work, a chapter on HD maintains that she produced her long poems by consciously manipulating images of herself. Moving forward to WW II, Gilbert and Gubar discuss the period's ``blitz on women'': Cheesecake pinups on tanks and VD posters conflated sex and death, while even positive images of the women left behind were tinged with resentment. They contend that metaphors from the war, transformed into images of sexual battle, haunted the poems of Sylvia Plath, who fought toward a way of being a woman beyond the old patriarchal traditions. At once playful and thoughtful, the final chapter considers the multiplicity of women's stories via the authors' several rewrites of Snow White—e.g., the no-longer-evil queen challenges gender roles by advising Snow White to ``marry the Prince but sleep with me too,'' while in another version a critically savvy queen realizes they're all ``merely signifiers, signifying nothing.'' A satisfying conclusion to an ambitious project.
Pub Date: Sept. 21, 1994
ISBN: 0-300-05631-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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