The Work of a Critic
First published in the Chronicle Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 2, 2012 The role of critics varies greatly according to the mission they im...
Author: Morris Dickstein
Remembering Daniel Bell, 1919-2011
Daniel Bell’s death closes out one of the most expansive and impressive intellectual careers of the twentieth century. He was a teacher of mine during my last...
The Challenge to Book Culture
On the face of it, it would be hard to imagine a more depressing cultural subject right now than the future of book culture. Publishers are hurting badly; drove...
All in the Family – Jackson Pollock
Published in the Times Literary Supplement, October 28, 2011 In the public mind Jackson Pollock was a tough-guy American artist, a cowboy out of Cody, Wyoming, ...
Battleship Potemkin and Beyond: Film and Revolutionary Politics
Published in Dissent Magazine (Summer 2011). For decades after it came out in 1925, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, portraying an episode in the firs...
“Whose Dog Are You?” (On Light Verse)
Published in Parnassus 32, Vols 1 & 2 (2011) Ogden Nash. The Best of Ogden Nash. Edited by Linell Nash Smith. Ivan R. Dee 2007. 465 pp. $28.95. Ameri...
An Unfinished Writer
The Life of Irene Némirovsky, 1903-1942 By Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt Translated from the French by Euan Cameron Alfred A. Knopf New York, 2010...
From Gatsby to Gatz
The hottest ticket in New York this month, surprisingly, is not a musical or comedy on Broadway but an adaptation of a thoroughly familiar eighty-five-year-old ...
Philip Roth’s New Novel – NEMESIS
Published in
War, Economy, History: Politics by Other Media
Published in Dissent, Summer 2010. When Kathryn Bigelow’s movie about the Iraq War, The Hurt Locker, swept the Academy Awards, it was a signal triumph for a p...