Morris Dickstein | |
|---|---|
| Born | (1940-02-23)February 23, 1940 New York City, New York, United States |
| Died | March 24, 2021(2021-03-24) (aged 81) New York City, New York, United States |
| Education | Columbia University (BA) Yale University (MA, PhD) Clare College, Cambridge Jewish Theological Seminary |
| Occupation(s) | Literary critic,cultural historian,professor |
| Employer | CUNY Graduate Center |
| Known for | Literary criticism |
Morris Dickstein (February 23, 1940 – March 24, 2021) was an American literary scholar, cultural historian, professor, essayist, book critic, and public intellectual. He was Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English atCUNY Graduate Center inNew York City.
A leading scholar of 20th-century American literature, film, literary criticism, and popular culture, Dickstein's work has appeared in both the popular press and academic journals, includingThe New York Times Book Review,Partisan Review,TriQuarterly,The New Republic,The Nation, Harper’s,New York Magazine,Critical Inquiry, Dissent,The Times Literary Supplement,The Chronicle of Higher Education, Slate, andBookforum.
Dickstein was a contributing editor toPartisan Review from 1972-2003 and a member of the board of directors for theNational Book Critics Circle.[1] He was a member of theNational Society of Film Critics and former president of theAssociation of Literary Scholars and Critics.[2]
Dickstein was the author of several books on American literature and culture, includingGates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (1977), which was named one of the “Best Books of 1977” byThe New York Times Book Review;[3]Double Agent: The Critic and Society (1992);Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945 – 1970 (2002);A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World (2005); andDancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (2009), which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.[4] The late authorNorman Mailer called Dickstein “one of our best and most distinguished critics of American literature.”[5]
On March 24, 2021, Dickstein died of complications fromParkinson's disease at his home in Manhattan at the age of 81.[6]
Dickstein was born inNew York City to Jewish émigrés from Europe. He grew up on theLower East Side of Manhattan and was raisedOrthodox Jewish. Dickstein attended aYeshiva for 12 years before doing his undergraduate work atColumbia University. During this period Dickstein also attended theJewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in order to “modernize” the Hebrew education he had received during his time at the Yeshiva. At JTS, Dickstein studied underAbraham Joshua Heschel. Moving away from Orthodox Judaism, Dickstein dropped out of the Seminary after three and half years, during his final semester of undergraduate work at Columbia.[7]
Initially thinking he would become a journalist or lawyer, during his sophomore year at Columbia Dickstein readJacques Barzun’sTeacher in America andLionel Trilling’sThe Liberal Imagination. These works convinced him that he could continue to do professionally what he loved to do as a student—read and write about literature.The Liberal Imagination introduced Dickstein to “literary criticism as an art and a calling.”[7]Dickstein graduated from Columbia with a B.A. in 1961 and an M.A. from Yale in 1963. From 1963 to 1964 he studied atClare College, Cambridge, before returning to Yale to receive his PhD in 1967.[8][9]Harold Bloom directed Dickstein's dissertation, entitledThe Divided Self: A Study of Keats’ Poetic Development.
For the majority of his professional career, Dickstein taught in theCUNY system, chiefly atQueens College and at CUNY Graduate Center, while maintaining strong ties with Columbia via the school's “Seminar on Theory of Literature” and the "Seminar on American Studies." Additionally, he served on the board of trustees for theColumbia Daily Spectator since 1977. He founded The Center for the Humanities at CUNY Graduate Center in 1992. He was named “Distinguished Professor of English” by CUNY in 1994.
Published in 2009 byW.W. Norton & Company, Dickstein's cultural history of the U.S. in the 1930s considers the complicated dynamic between art and entertainment in the decade, suggesting that the era produced a wide array of popular culture that shares an interest in how “ordinary people lived, how they suffered, interacted, took pleasure in one another, and endured.”[10] A sizable portion ofDancing in the Dark focuses on what is typically thought of as "escapist" entertainment from the decade. The book is filled with extended analyses of the decade's most popular sorts of entertainment: the musicals ofBusby Berkeley, the performances ofHumphrey Bogart, the films ofFrank Capra, and the dance routines ofFred Astaire andGinger Rogers. It also contains lengthy analyses of movements and works that are typically thought of as "high culture": theArt Deco movement, the novels ofWilliam Faulkner,Orson Welles’Citizen Kane, and the orchestral pieces ofAaron Copland.
Maureen Corrigan atNPR callsDancing in the Dark “a penetrating work of cultural history” and “a thrill to read” because of Dickstein's “zesty voice” and “lightly worn erudition.”[11] The book was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.
Published in 2002 byHarvard University Press,Leopards in the Temple is a collection of essays about post-WWII U.S. fiction, film, and culture. Dickstein's work in this book provides a corrective to the common characterization of the 1950s as a time exclusively of conformity and conservatism. He identifies the “strong radical undercurrents that led directly to the culture wars of the 1960s” through a close examination of the “stream of outsider figures who would do more than anything else to define the character of postwar writing”:[12]Ralph Ellison,Flannery O’Connor,Norman Mailer, andJack Kerouac, among others. Authors of popular literary fiction in the 1950s, these writers expressed deeply felt cultural anxieties about conformity, race, technology, and patriarchy, even as the culture-at-large was in the midst of unparalleled economic prosperity. Dickstein points to the popularization ofFreud’s theories, and to theFilm Noir of the period, in order to deflate the “selective cultural memory” of the 1950s as a time of “sunny, even mindless optimism.”[12]
The Los Angeles Times writes thatLeopards in the Temple is the most “lucid and enjoyably written study of postwar American fiction to have come along in years.”[13]
