A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World

by 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 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.

Genres: Literary Criticism

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Morris Dickstein is Distinguished Professor of English and Theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center and the author of Gates of Eden and Leopards in the Temple, among other works. He lives in New York City. "

Reviews

[Wes Young · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely fascinating (if you're into this sort of thing). Also, Dickstein's book, which is a collection of academic essays, shows that scholarly writings can be both accessible and useful to a general audience. In fact, that very point is a bit of a theme in this work.

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

Picked this one up originally for its chapter on Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Russell Banks, but ended up spending more time with it and reading the entire book. Although in sum these essays reconsider realism while sniping at deconstructionism and historicism, Dickstein is foremost a reader like us: A lover of literature. He's a well read, thoughtful, intelligent, analytical, yet compassionate reader who recognizes that writers write and readers read for reasons literary critics typically ignore or refuse to recognize. So this is the kind of literary criticism that may send your towards rather than away from the books and authors he discusses. For the most part these essays are re-workings of pieces Dickstein originally wrote as reviews or introductions, or presented as papers at conferences and lectures. As such you'll find a broad range of authors discussed: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Upton Sinclair, Willa Cather, Mary McCarthy, George Orwell, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gunter Grass, Saul Bellow, Celine, in addition to Banks, Ford, and Carver.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent. I love to read, and I love to read great writing that offers insight into other great writers. This book by Morris Dickstein does just that. Dickstein seems to have read everything by anybody that matters, and he thinks deeply about the strengths and weaknesses of these varied authors. The book creates a superb reading list for the discerning reader.