A Mirror in the Roadway

Literature and the Real World

Morris Dickstein

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780691130330, 9780691119960
• eBook ISBN: 9781400826667
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

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 essays probing the strengths and limitations of a historical approach to literature and criticism.

INDEX

Abraham, Pearl, 179

Adolphe (Constant), 98

Affliction (Banks), 207

The Age of Innocence (Wharton), 29–30, 55, 61

Agnon, S. Y., 144–49

Alexander, Edward, 234

Algren, Nelson, 39

“The All-Star Literary Vaudeville” (Wilson), 90

Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Chabon), 180

The American Jeremiad (Bercovitch), 162

The American Jitters (Wilson), 92

American Psycho (Ellis), 203

The American Scene (James), 27–28

American Studies, 5, 252, 255

America’s Coming-of-Age (Brooks), 56

The Anatomy Lesson (Roth), 166, 177, 188

Anderson, Sherwood, 53

Angels in America (play), xiii

Animal Farm (Orwell), 127

Antin, Mary, 180

Appeal to Reason (weekly newspaper), 42–43

Appelfeld, Aharon, xv, 170

Arguing the World (Dorman), 234

The Armies of the Night (Mailer), 185

Arnold, Matthew, 249

“Arthur Koestler” (Orwell), 132

“Artists in Uniform” (McCarthy), 97

As I Lay Dying (Faulkner), 219

The Assistant (Malamud), 172–73, 193

Auerbach, Erich, 3, 243

autobiographical protagonist, 184–98

The Autumn of the Patriarch (García Márquez), ix, 138–40

Axel’s Castle (Wilson), 92

Babbitt (Lewis), 51, 57

Babel, Isaac, 106, 236, 237

Babylonian exile, 104–5

“Babylon Revisited” (Fitzgerald), 84, 85

Banks, Russell, 203, 207

Barbary Shore (Mailer), 225

Barrett, William, 97

Barth, John, 186

Barthelme, Donald, 200

Barthes, Roland, xii, 228, 229

“Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street” (Melville), 24–25

“The Bath” (Carver), 202

Bauer, Felice, 119, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125

Baumbach, Jonathan, 197

Beckett, Samuel, xv, 110, 112, 113, 115–19

Beef Trust strike (1904), 43

“Before the Law” (Kafka), 123

Bellow, Saul, xiii, 11, 32, 39–40, 170, 171, 174–75, 180–81, 199; “By the St. La...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Mirror in the Roadway
• American Realism: The Sense of Time and Place
• A Different World: From Realism to Modernism
• Postwar Fiction in Context: Genealogies
• Reading and History
• Sources
• Index