Double Agent is a watershed in the recent revival of interest in the role of the public critic and intellectual who writes about culture, politics, and the arts for an intelligent general audience. Offering acute portraits of critics both famous and neglected, Dickstein traces the evolution of cultural criticism over the last century from Matthew Arnold to New Historicism. He examines the development of practical criticism, the rise and fall of literary journalism, and the growth of American Studies, and rereads the work of critics like Arnold, Walter Pater, I.A. Richards, Roland...
Double Agent is a watershed in the recent revival of interest in the role of the public critic and intellectual who writes about culture, pol...
The twenty-five years after the Second World War were a lively and fertile period for the American novel and an era of momentous transformation in American society. Taking his title from the Kafka parable about the leopards who kept racing into the courtyard of the temple, disrupting the sacrifice, until they were made part of the ritual, Morris Dickstein shows how a daring band of outsiders reshaped the American novel and went on to dominate American fiction for the rest of the century.
In fluid prose, offering a social as well as a literary history, Dickstein provides a...
The twenty-five years after the Second World War were a lively and fertile period for the American novel and an era of momentous transformation in ...
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 naive 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...
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 t...
A new 30th Anniversary paperback edition of an award-winning classic.
Winner of the National Book Award, 1976
World of Our Fathers traces the story of Eastern Europe's Jews to America over four decades. Beginning in the 1880s, it offers a rich portrayal of the East European Jewish experience in New York, and shows how the immigrant generation tried to maintain their Yiddish culture while becoming American. It is essential reading for those interested in understanding why these forebears to many of today's American Jews made the decision to leave their...
A new 30th Anniversary paperback edition of an award-winning classic.
Although long considered the most distinctive American contribution to philosophy, pragmatism--with its problem-solving emphasis and its contingent view of truth--lost popularity in mid-century after the advent of World War II, the horror of the Holocaust, and the dawning of the Cold War. Since the 1960s, however, pragmatism in many guises has again gained prominence, finding congenial places to flourish within growing intellectual movements. This volume of new essays brings together leading philosophers, historians, legal scholars, social thinkers, and literary critics to examine the...
Although long considered the most distinctive American contribution to philosophy, pragmatism--with its problem-solving emphasis and its contingent vi...
The turbulent 1960s, almost from its outset, produced a dizzyingdisplay of cultural images and ideas that were as colorful as the psychedelic T-shirts that became part of its iconography. It was not, however, until Morris Dickstein's landmark Gates of Eden, first published in 1977, that we could fullygrasp the impact of this raucous decade in American history as amomentous cultural epoch in its own right, asmuch as Jazz Age America or Weimar Germany. From Ginsberg and Dylan to Vonnegut and Heller, this lasting work brilliantly re-creates not only the intellectual and political...
The turbulent 1960s, almost from its outset, produced a dizzyingdisplay of cultural images and ideas that were as colorful as the psychedelic T-shi...
An indispensable collection of one of America's most outspoken and original critics of the second half of the twentieth century Man of letters, political critic, public intellectual, Irving Howe was one of America's most exemplary and embattled writers. Since his death in 1993 at age 72, Howe's work and his personal example of commitment to high principle, both literary and political, have had a vigorous afterlife. This posthumous and capacious collection includes twenty-six essays that originally appeared in such publications as the New York Review of Books, the...
An indispensable collection of one of America's most outspoken and original critics of the second half of the twentieth century Man of let...
