Show The Graduate Center Menu
 
 

Morris Dickstein
Position: Distinguished Professor, Graduate Center. English, Theatre. Senior Fellow, Center for the Humanities, City University of New York
Campus Affiliation: City College of New York
Phone: (212) 817-7210
Room Number: 4401
Office Hours: By appointment
mdickstein@gc.cuny.edu
Degrees/Diplomas: Ph.D., Yale University.
Research Interests: Contemporary literature and American studies; urban and ethnic fiction; realism and modernism; cultural criticism; English Romantic poetry; film genre and film history; politics and literature; literary journalism, literary criticism, and public intellectuals.


Selected Publications:

  • The Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World. (Princeton U.P., forthcoming, 2005).

  • Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970. (Harvard U.P., 2002). For discussion see "Book Club," Slate (June 4-6, 2002);

    http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_book_club/features/2002/leopards_in_the_temple/chronicle_of_a_death.html

  • "Fiction and Society, 1940-1970," in Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. 7, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge U.P., 1999).

  • Editor, The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture (Duke UP, 1998).

  • Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties. New York: Basic Books, 1977. Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, 1978. Most recent paperback edition: Harvard U. P., 1997.

  • Double Agent: The Critic and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Paperback edition, Oxford, 1996.

  • "Popular Fiction and Critical Values: The Novel as a Challenge to Literary History," in Reconstructing American Literary History, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch. Harvard English Studies 13 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).

  • Literary Freud: Mechanisms of Defense and the Poetic Will (Psychiatry and the Humanities, vol. 4), ed. Joseph H. Smith, M.D. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).

  • Keats and His Poetry: A Study in Development. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Paperback edition, Phoenix Books, University of Chicago Press, 1974.

Recent Work:

  • "The Home and the World: Film Documentaries and Social Crises," Dissent (Winter 2004);

  • "Steinbeck and the Great Depression," South Atlantic Quarterly (Winter 2004).

  • "Hope Against Hope: Orwell's Posthumous Novel," in The American Scholar (Spring 2004). Also in George Orwell: Into the Twenty-First Century, ed. Thomas Cushman and John Rodden (Paradigm Publishers, 2004).

  • 10,000-word essay on Jewish American fiction, Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, ed. Jay Parini (Oxford U. P., 2004).

  • "In a Dark Wood," review of James Wood, The Book Against God. Slate (May 30, 2003);

    http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2003/05/in_a_dark_wood.html

  • Radio interview by Hugh LaFollette, East Tennesse State University, on Leopards in the Temple; (April 23, 2003).

  • "Between Generations: An Interview with Morris Dickstein," with Robert Boynton. Minnesota Review, Nos. 53-55 (2002).

  • "Afterword: Historicism and Its Limits," in Historicizing Theory, ed. Peter C. Herman (SUNY Press, 2004). First appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education (May 23, 2003); http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i37/37b00701.htm.

  • An essay adapted from the Cambridge History, "Ralph Ellison, Race, and American Culture," appeared in the Spring issue of Raritan.

  • An excerpt, dealing with Salinger, the Beats, and the road novel, appeared in Beat Culture (Amsterdam: Vu University Press, 1999).

  • May, 1999: talk on "Roots of the Counterculture" at a conference on the Sixties at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, TX.