A Mirror in the Roadway

[Dave Monroe]

Dickstein, Morris.  A Mirror in the Roadway:
   Literature and the Real World.
   Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2007.

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.

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7984.html

Introduction

http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i7984.html

http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i7984.pdf


 
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