Interviews
Interviews on Dancing in the Dark:
Audio/video interviews:
Fresh Air:
Morris Dickstein [is[ not only one of America's most perceptive literary critics, but also one of our best critical writers [...] a penetrating work of cultural history like this one gives the reader who holds fast to it a sense of dwelling in a circle of illumination amid all the shadows.
Listen to or read Fresh Air’s review of Dancing in the Dark, and read the introduction of the book
Audio of interview conducted by WICN’s Mark Lynch
Listen now…
Podcast of an interview conducted by WABE’s Valerie Jackson.
Listen now….
Video of interview conducted by Lewis Lapham on bloomberg.com.
Interview with WNYC’s On the Media.
Read the transcript, or listen to the interview here:
Audio of interview for Zefrey Throwell’s Frank Prattle. October 2009.
Interviews in print
The Author Speaks: Art in Times of Despair. Interview conducted by AARP Bulletin Today’s Krista Walton, October 2009.
Reading Into the Great Depression: Humanities Magazine interviews Morris Dickstein
When I was first working on the book, I was at a party talking with Diana Trilling, the widow of Lionel Trilling, and a very forthright and forceful woman with a strong literary reputation in her own right. Someone came up to me and said, ‘Oh, what are you working on?’ And I said, ‘A book of the 1930s.’ And they said, ‘What aspect of the 1930s?’ And without waiting for me to say anything, she answered for me, ‘Of course, the Communist experience, that was the most important thing in the 1930s.’
And I said, ‘Well, no. That was certainly important, but it’s actually the movies of the thirties that first drew me in.’ ‘The movies of the thirties?,’ she said, incredulously, looking somewhere between puzzled and disapproving. Most intellectuals, like most other Americans, actually loved the movies, but couldn’t take them seriously.
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Interview with Morris Dickstein by the Dallas Morning News’s Chris Vognar.
“When you look at the escapist art, it’s full of either direct or covert allusions to the Depression,” Dickstein says. “There are still ways you can think about it as escapist, but it’s certainly not escapist by not dealing with the Depression. On the other hand, if you look at some of the supposedly socially conscious works, like The Grapes of Wrath, it’s damn entertaining in all sorts of ways, especially the movie version.”
Read the interview…
Quoted in the Press-Enterprise on psychological and cultural effects of the current economic downturn.
Art and Society: Meeting at the Crossroads: A Conversation with Morris Dickstein. Interview from USIA Electronic Journal, June 1998.
Other interviews
Between Generations. A lengthy interview on the changes in the field of literary criticism, ranging from the 1950s to today. Conducted by Robert Boynton for the Minnesota Review, and later reprinted in Critics at Work: Interviews 1993-2003.
