For the higher grades you will need a concept or thesis which you will develop and or prove over the course of the essay You should also demonstrate evidence of wider reading Today flesh out cultural background of American hardboiled tradition ID: 301080
Download Presentation The PPT/PDF document "Comparative Coursework: Detective Fictio..." is the property of its rightful owner. Permission is granted to download and print the materials on this web site for personal, non-commercial use only, and to display it on your personal computer provided you do not modify the materials and that you retain all copyright notices contained in the materials. By downloading content from our website, you accept the terms of this agreement.
Slide1
Comparative Coursework: Detective FictionSlide2
For the higher grades, you will need a
concept
or
thesis
, which you will develop and or “prove” over the course of the essay.You should also demonstrate evidence of wider reading.Today: “flesh out” cultural background of American hard-boiled traditionIntroduction to some critical opinionsPossible points of comparison.Slide3
Cultural-historical backdrop
Before we start:
Moderni
sm
= artistic (especially literary) avant garde of the early twentieth century.
Moderni
ty
= technological, industrial, institutional scene of any given epoch/time.Slide4
2 precursors to American tradition of hard-boiled detective fiction
:
1)
Ratiocinative
Detective Fiction Begins with Poe in the 1840s, and his armchair detective C. Auguste
Dupin
.
Doyle takes over the role of leading writer of detective fiction with Sherlock
Holmes
Doyle
profits from magazine sales – his stories appeared in The Strand Magazine, which became a bestselling publication with the serialization of The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-02).Slide5
2 precursors to American tradition of hard-boiled detective fiction
:
2
) The Western
Published in dime novels and pulp magazinesTrue crime stories of, e.g., Jesse James, the James-Younger gang, the Dalton gang, and the travelling wild-west shows had made westerns popular.
Frontiersman/cowboy
eventually becomes the
gumshoe; the frontier
becomes the
city
Possible comparison: the city as “frontier” of post-war modernity?.Slide6
The Pulps
1935
1937
1930Slide7
The Pulps
Pulp fiction magazines (so called because of the poor quality paper they were printed on) & dime novels were popular in America by the early C20
Targeted working class readers; usually gender-specific
Because of their demographic, they had to be cheap; this makes competition tight.
Finding winning formula & winning writers is important.Before the early 20s, pulp magazines generally published sub-standard, Holmes-style stories.In the early 20s, Carroll John Daly published the first so-called “hard-boiled” detective stories. The kinship with the western is clear in his stories.
Daly publishes them in
Black Mask
magazine; it becomes the leading hard-boiled/detective/adventure pulp (still has a website).Daly popular in his day but has been eclipsed by Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Gardner, Cain, and others.
Hammett, before becoming a professional writer, worked as a writer of advertising copy, and as a Pinkerton.Slide8
It’s interesting to note, then, that hard-boiled detective fiction
could
be seen as
more
a product of cultural modernity as of artistic modernism (difference?). However, some critics make the case for Hammett, Chandler and others to be considered properly a part of the American modernist canon.
Additionally, in Europe (France particularly), Hammett, Chandler, Himes etc. were not seen as separate from the major American modernist writers of the day – Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Dos
Passos
, and others. They were all part of the same tradition
(as opposed to
genre
).Slide9
One option, then, is to start with literary history/culture, and think about different types of modernism – “high”/”literary” modernism versus, e.g., “proletarian”/”dime-store”/populist modernism...
Other options emerging from this:
Classic vs. hard-boiled detective fiction
Frontier/west/country vs.
postwar citySlide10
What the critics have said
Holmes, in Doyle’s
A Study in Scarlet
(first Holmes novel):
“Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. … He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine.” Northrop Frye,
Anatomy of Criticism
(1957; London: Penguin, 1990, p. 48)
The “ironic comedy [of detective fiction] is addressed to people who can realize that murderous violence is less an attack on a virtuous society by a malignant individual than a symptom of that society’s own viciousness.”
Tsvetan
Todorov , “The Typology of Detective Fiction [1966],” in The Poetics of Prose
, trans. Richard Howard (1971; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977, p. 43)
[T]he masterpiece of popular literature is precisely the book which best fits its genre. Detective fiction has its norms; to “develop” them is also to disappoint them: to “improve upon” detective fiction is to write “literature,” not detective fiction. The whodunit par excellence is not the one which transgresses the rules of the genre, but the one which conforms to them[.]Slide11
What the critics have said
Philosopher Gilles
Deleuze
praised hard-boiled detective/crime fiction for presenting “society in its entirety
at the heights of its powers of falsehood.” (“The Philosophy of Crime Novels,” Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974, ed. David
Laponjade
, trans. Michael Taormina [Paris:
Semiotext(e) Foreign Agent Series, 2004, p. 83])
Fredric Jameson suggests that the trails of blood in Chandler’s novels oppose the basic logic of the classical detective story, which “always invests murder with purpose [...]. The murder is [...] made to bear meaning and significance by the convergence of all lines upon it. In the world of the classical detective story nothing happens which is not related to the central murder.” Precisely through the apparent meaninglessness of death, argues Jameson, Chandler “is able to bring us up short without warning, against the reality of death itself, stale death, reaching out to remind the living of its own
moldering resting place.” (“On Raymond Chandler,” The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory
,
eds
Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe [San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983, pp. 146, 148.])Slide12
Links/Comparisons/Texts
Alienation
Cultural politics of detective fiction: Marxism/liberalism/conservatism
Gender/sexual politics
RaceDepictions of the city/landscapePost-war nihilism/traumaDetectives/detection as cultural metaphorSignificance of violence
Voice/perspective
Eliot’s
The Waste Land
Walter Mosley
Chester Himes
Sue GraftonSarah Paretsky
Virginia Wolf
Toni Morrison (
Jazz
, depictions of the city)
John Steinbeck
Paul AusterGraham GreeneRon HansenCormac MacCarthyOxford poetsSlide13
Links/Comparisons/Texts
Walter
Mosley
Chester Himes
Sue GraftonSarah ParetskyPaul Auster
Graham
Greene
George Pelecanos
(
A Firing Offence
)James M. CainDoylePoeScience Fiction?
Ron Hansen
Cormac
MacCarthy
Patricia
Highsmith (Ripley)Richard Price (The Wanderers/Clockers)Eliot’s The Waste LandVirginia WolfToni Morrison (Jazz, depictions of the city)John SteinbeckOxford poetsAnne Tyler (depictions of “middle America”)Annie Proulx (masculinity [“Brokeback Mountain”];landscape)Angela Carter (genre/postmodernism/feminism – careful if doing gothic)