Articles
A small selection of articles, mostly from the last decade.
1930s
Interview with Inside Higher Ed on Dancing in the Dark and the 1930s, March 10, 2010.
The Author Speaks: Art in Times of Despair. Interview conducted by AARP Bulletin Today’s Krista Walton, October 2009.
Facing the Music: What 1930s pop culture can teach us about our own hard times. The American Scholar, Autumn 2009.
How Song, Dance, and Movies Bailed Us Out of the Depression. Los Angeles Times, April 1, 2009.
Quoted in Generation OMG, New York Times, March 7, 2009.
How the Recession Might Affect the Kids. Video interview with Business Week.
Reading Into the Great Depression. Humanities, July/August 2009.
Audio of interview for Zefrey Throwell’s Frank Prattle. October 2009.
American Culture: Then and Now
High Five with Morris Dickstein. Dickstein discusses his five favorite musicals. Forbes, March 3, 2010.
From Woodstock to Sarah Palin, or Not. Did Woodstock Change America? NYTimes.com, August 9, 2009.
Going Native: On What Happened to the Literary Canon when American Literature Became Good Enough for Americans. The American Scholar, Winter 2007.
Art and Society: Meeting at the Crossroads: A Conversation with Morris Dickstein. Interview from USIA Electronic Journal, June 1998.
The New York Intellectuals. Adapted from a talk at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in August 1996.
Critics and Criticism
Richard Rorty, Remembered. Reminiscences of Richard Rorty. Slate, June 18, 2007.
Thinking about Theory’s Empire. The Valve: A Literary Organ. July 14, 2005.
Literary Theory and Historical Understanding. The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 23, 2003.
Postmodern Fog is Beginning to Lift. On contemporary literary criticism. L.A. Times, May 26, 2005.
Praising Not the Hedgehog but the Fox. On Geoffrey Hartman’s “A Scholar’s Tale.” New York Sun, December 26th, 2007.
Between Generations. Robert S. Boynton interviews Morris Dickstein. The Minnesota Review, 2002.
Train of Thought. On Edmund Wilson. Bookforum, Dec/Jan 2008.
Jewish Culture and Writers
Why Are Jews Liberals?. Respondent to question posed by Tablet Magazine, September 10, 2009.
Memory Unbound. On Henry Roth’s career. The Threepenny Review, Summer 2007.
The Toils of Bernard Malamud. Review of Janna Malamud Smith’s My Father is a Book. Times Literary Supplement, May 10, 2006.
From Ethnic Ripples, a Tidal Wave. Postwar Jewish Writers Conserved the Past While Dreaming Beyond It. Forward, May 07, 2004.
Don’t Call It Night. On Amos Oz’s “The Same Sea.” The Nation, Jan. 21, 2002.
Review of Philip Roth’s “My Life as a Man”. New York Times, June 2, 1974.
American Fiction
Ralph Ellison Visible. On Arnold Rampersad’s biography of Ellison. Times Literary Supplement, May 23, 2007.
Remembering John Updike. Dissent, Feb. 2, 2009.
Ig-Nobel Thoughts. Response to question of whether U.S. literary culture is too isolated. Inside Higher Ed, October 8, 2008.
Fiction and Political Fact, Bookforum, June/July/August 2008.
The Un-Generation: Mailer, Paley, and Vonnegut. Los Angeles Times, December 30, 2007.
The Nijinsky of Ambivalence. On Norman Mailer and the 1967 Pentagon March. The Nation, December 10, 2007.
Quoted in Army of One: A Feisty and Enigmatic Sense of Self Drove Norman Mailer. Washington Post, Nov. 12, 2007.
All Made Up: Edmund White writes the novel Stephen Crane never did. Bookforum Sept/Oct/Nov 2007.
The Inner Lives of Men. On John Williams’s Stoner. New York Times, June 17, 2007.
Moviegoing
The Politics of the Thriller. Dissent Magazine, Spring 2006.
Going to the Movies: The Light Fantastic. Partisan Review, July 2002.
