Books by Joseph Litvak

Theoretically sophisticated: How often has this term been used to distinguish a work of contemporary criticism and what, exactly, does it mean? This book shows how the politics of sophistication pervades contemporary culture both in the mainstream and at the academic margins.

Theatricality as deployed here encourages the rethinking of the 19th-century novel and its cultural contexts in all their instability and ambivalence. This rethinking yields not only a new interpretation of the 19th-century novel, but also a new theatrical approach to interpretation itself.

In a rethinking of the Hollywood blacklist and McCarthyite America, this book reveals a political regime that did not end with the 1950s or even with the Cold War: a regime of compulsory sycophancy, in which the good citizen is an informer, ready to denounce anyone who will not play the part of the earnest, patriotic American.