A mirror in the roadway : literature and the real world

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A mirror in the roadway : literature and the real world

Morris Dickstein

Princeton University Press, c2005

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注記

Includes bibliographical references and index

内容説明・目次

内容説明

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 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, Gunter Grass, Mary McCarthy, George Orwell, Philip Roth, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. 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.

目次

Preface ix Acknowledgments xvii Introduction: A Mirror in the Roadway 1 American Realism: The Sense of Time and Place 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 A Different World: From Realism to Modernism 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 Postwar Fiction in Context: Genealogies 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 Reading and History 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 Sources 259 Index 271

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