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The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970.
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From: Sandy P. Klein <spklein52@hotmail.com>
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/19/books/review/RV101151.html
May 19, 2002
BOOKS IN BRIEF: 'LEOPARDS IN THE TEMPLE'
By JENNY TURNER
I n a parable by Kafka, wild beasts break into a temple and disrupt the
act of worship again and again, until the ritual is modified to
incorporate their visits. For the literary scholar Morris Dickstein's
purposes, the leopards are the newer, more cosmopolitan writers -- black,
beatnik, Jewish, homosexual -- who exploded upon the artificially unified
temple of American letters at the end of World War II. Dickstein's study
''Leopards in the Temple'' begins with the war novels of Norman Mailer,
Joseph Heller and James Jones, then takes a sharp turn inward with
Chester B. Himes and Saul Bellow. He prefers Paul Bowles and Tennessee
Williams (especially Williams's ''neglected but wonderful'' short
stories) to Truman Capote, ''a fashionable tourist in the lower depths.''
As Dickstein's study moves forward, its central irony only deepens: the
more prosperous and outwardly peaceful the nation, the more existentially
anxious its writers seem to become. The best writing from the 1950's, as
Dickstein says, has an undertone of hysteria, a desperate pathos, a sense
of entrapment, a mournful sense of fear and loss. Dickstein particularly
values Bernard Malamud's books ''The Assistant'' and ''The Magic
Barrel.'' But he is also good on Vladimir Nabokov, whose ''Lolita'' he
impishly reads as a sort of pre-emptive ''sendup'' of Jack Kerouac's ''On
the Road,'' with Humbert Humbert as an advance parody of the priapic Dean
Moriarty and ''a phantasmagoric landscape of cultural kitsch and inward
fixation'' standing in for the pointless, illusory freedom of Sal
Paradise.
LEOPARDS IN THE TEMPLE
The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970.
By Morris Dickstein.
Harvard University, paper, $15.95.
________________________________________________________________________________
Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: Click Here
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/19/books/review/RV101151.html
May 19, 2002
BOOKS IN BRIEF: 'LEOPARDS IN THE TEMPLE'
By JENNY TURNER
I n a parable by Kafka, wild beasts break into a temple and disrupt the
act of worship again and again, until the ritual is modified to
incorporate their visits. For the literary scholar Morris Dickstein's
purposes, the leopards are the newer, more cosmopolitan writers -- black,
beatnik, Jewish, homosexual -- who exploded upon the artificially unified
temple of American letters at the end of World War II. Dickstein's study
''Leopards in the Temple'' begins with the war novels of Norman Mailer,
Joseph Heller and James Jones, then takes a sharp turn inward with
Chester B. Himes and Saul Bellow. He prefers Paul Bowles and Tennessee
Williams (especially Williams's ''neglected but wonderful'' short
stories) to Truman Capote, ''a fashionable tourist in the lower depths.''
As Dickstein's study moves forward, its central irony only deepens: the
more prosperous and outwardly peaceful the nation, the more existentially
anxious its writers seem to become. The best writing from the 1950's, as
Dickstein says, has an undertone of hysteria, a desperate pathos, a sense
of entrapment, a mournful sense of fear and loss. Dickstein particularly
values Bernard Malamud's books ''The Assistant'' and ''The Magic
Barrel.'' But he is also good on Vladimir Nabokov, whose ''Lolita'' he
impishly reads as a sort of pre-emptive ''sendup'' of Jack Kerouac's ''On
the Road,'' with Humbert Humbert as an advance parody of the priapic Dean
Moriarty and ''a phantasmagoric landscape of cultural kitsch and inward
fixation'' standing in for the pointless, illusory freedom of Sal
Paradise.
LEOPARDS IN THE TEMPLE
The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970.
By Morris Dickstein.
Harvard University, paper, $15.95.
________________________________________________________________________________
Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: Click Here