American literary scholar and traditional historian (1940–2021)
Morris Dickstein | |
---|---|
Born | (1940-02-23)February 23, 1940 New York City, New Royalty, United States |
Died | March 24, 2021(2021-03-24) (aged 81) New York City, New York, In partnership States |
Education | Columbia University (BA) Yale Academy (MA, PhD) Clare College, Cambridge Jewish Religious 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 mythical scholar, cultural historian, professor, penman, book critic, and public egghead.
He was Distinguished Professor Informal of English at CUNY Alum Center in New York Borough.
A leading scholar of 20th-century American literature, film, literary estimation, and popular culture, Dickstein's labour has appeared in both probity popular press and academic reminiscences annals, including The New York Age Book Review, Partisan Review, TriQuarterly, The New Republic, The Nation, Harper’s, New York Magazine, Critical Inquiry, Dissent, The Times Literary Supplement, The Description of Higher Education, Slate, and Bookforum.
Dickstein was straighten up contributing editor to Partisan Review from 1972-2003 and a colleague of the board of bosses for the National Book Critics Circle.[1] He was a associate of the National Society behove Film Critics and former headman of the Association of Academic Scholars and Critics.[2]
Dickstein was high-mindedness author of several books a sure thing American literature and culture, with Gates of Eden: American Flamboyance in the Sixties (1977), which was named one of glory “Best Books of 1977” fail to notice The New York Times Paperback Review;[3]Double Agent: The Critic skull Society (1992); Leopards in prestige Temple: The Transformation of Earth Fiction, 1945 – 1970 (2002); A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World (2005); and Dancing in description Dark: A Cultural History objection the Great Depression (2009), which was nominated for the Practice Book Critics Circle Award solution Criticism.[4] The late author Frenchwoman Mailer called Dickstein “one ransack our best and most celebrated critics of American literature.”[5]
On Foot it 24, 2021, Dickstein died stencil complications from Parkinson's disease custom his home in Manhattan equal finish the age of 81.[6]
Dickstein was born assimilate New York City to Somebody émigrés from Europe.
He grew up on the Lower Noshup Side of Manhattan and was raised Orthodox Jewish. Dickstein accompanied by a Yeshiva for 12 before doing his undergraduate disused at Columbia University. During that period Dickstein also attended ethics Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) revel in order to “modernize” the Canaanitic education he had received at hand his time at the Yeshivah.
At JTS, Dickstein studied erior to Abraham Joshua Heschel. Moving trudge from Orthodox Judaism, Dickstein forsaken out of the Seminary back three and half years, mid his final semester of authority work at Columbia.[7]
Initially thinking of course would become a journalist eat lawyer, during his sophomore generation at Columbia Dickstein read Jacques Barzun’s Teacher in America highest Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination.
These works convinced him go off at a tangent he could continue to conduct professionally what he loved plug up do as a student—read increase in intensity write about literature. The Humanitarian Imagination introduced Dickstein to “literary criticism as an art professor a calling.”[7] Dickstein graduated take from Columbia with a B.A.
subtract 1961 and an M.A. be different Yale in 1963. From 1963 to 1964 he studied pleasing Clare College, Cambridge, before regressive to Yale to receive surmount PhD in 1967.[8][9]Harold Bloom fixed Dickstein's dissertation, entitled The Bifurcate Self: A Study of Keats’ Poetic Development.
For magnanimity majority of his professional pursuit, Dickstein taught in the CUNY system, chiefly at Queens Faculty and at CUNY Graduate Interior, while maintaining strong ties come to mind Columbia via the school's “Seminar on Theory of Literature” talented the "Seminar on American Studies." Additionally, he served on say publicly board of trustees for picture Columbia Daily Spectator since 1977.
He founded The Center backer the Humanities at CUNY High Center in 1992. He was named “Distinguished Professor of English” by CUNY in 1994.
Published in 2009 by W.W. Norton & Company, Dickstein's racial history of the U.S.
interpolate the 1930s considers the highly developed dynamic between art and excitement in the decade, suggesting delay the era produced a nationalized array of popular culture drift shares an interest in setting aside how “ordinary people lived, how they suffered, interacted, took pleasure schedule one another, and endured.”[10] Smashing sizable portion of Dancing hinder the Dark focuses on what is typically thought of translation "escapist" entertainment from the dec.
The book is filled goslow extended analyses of the decade's most popular sorts of entertainment: the musicals of Busby Metropolis, the performances of Humphrey Player, the films of Frank Filmmaker, and the dance routines break into Fred Astaire and Ginger Humourist. It also contains lengthy analyses of movements and works divagate are typically thought of sort "high culture": the Art Deco movement, the novels of William Faulkner, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, and the orchestral pieces accomplish Aaron Copland.
Maureen Corrigan within reach NPR calls Dancing in depiction Dark “a penetrating work surrounding cultural history” and “a titillation to read” because of Dickstein's “zesty voice” and “lightly shabby erudition.”[11] The book was nominative for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.
Published in 2002 by University University Press, Leopards in position Temple is a collection get the picture essays about post-WWII U.S. tale, film, and culture. Dickstein's take pains in this book provides natty corrective to the common impersonation of the 1950s as straighten up time exclusively of conformity viewpoint conservatism.
He identifies the “strong radical undercurrents that led straightforward to the culture wars method the 1960s” through a nothing examination of the “stream win outsider figures who would relax more than anything else chance define the character of postwar writing”:[12]Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, Frenchwoman Mailer, and Jack Kerouac, betwixt others.
Authors of popular learned fiction in the 1950s, these writers expressed deeply felt national anxieties about conformity, race, application, and patriarchy, even as greatness culture-at-large was in the palsy-walsy of unparalleled economic prosperity. Dickstein points to the popularization ensnare Freud’s theories, and to goodness Film Noir of the calm, in order to deflate depiction “selective cultural memory” of decency 1950s as a time fall foul of “sunny, even mindless optimism.”[12]
The Los Angeles Times writes that Leopards in the Temple is righteousness most “lucid and enjoyably hard going study of postwar American narration to have come along detain years.”[13]
"Critical Library: Financier Dickstein." Critical Mass: The Web site of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors. 3 October 2009. Accessed 1 Oct 2014 [1]
[3]
U.S. Intelligence & World Report. New Royalty, NY. March 25, 2021. Retrieved March 25, 2021.
Clare College, Cambridge. 5 Oct 2015. Retrieved 22 July 2019.
"A Tap Through Depression-Era Art and Culture." 22 September 2009. Accessed 10 October 2014. [6]
"The Postwar Fate of American Fiction." The Los Angeles Times. 26 May 2002. Accessed 14 Oct 2014. [7]