Noir Tradition Research Articles

Penance

Penance Octavio Escobar Giraldo (bio) Translation from the Spanish Click for larger view View full resolution In Colombian writer Octavio Escobar Giraldo's first publication in English, it isn't only the parishioner saying her Hail Marys. "I confess, Father. I confess that I am happy about the death of Joaquín López." The priest tried to contain his surprise. "They killed Joaquín López?" "Yes, Father, they just confirmed it on the radio. As of this morning, they said that the army was identifying his body." Silently, the priest regretted that he had not heard the news before leaving the rectory. "It's not very Christian to be happy about the death of another human being, my child." "I know, Father. That is why I came to confession." "Did you know Joaquín López?" "No, Father. But my father and brother knew him." The priest remembered how broken the woman had been at the burial of her relatives. He scratched his bald head and softened his voice: "Repent of that feeling, child, for it is a terrible sin. Say five Hail Marys." "Only five, Father?" "If you say them with devotion and repent, then, yes, only five. And see to it that your son isn't absent from Saturday catechism class anymore." "Yes, Father. At eleven o'clock, right?" "Ten, my child. At ten on the dot." "He will be there, Father. I will send along some mandarin oranges for you. They are so sweet! And a few figs in syrup." "That's not necessary, my child." "I will send them along anyway. Thank you for everything, Father." "You're welcome. Now go in peace." The priest blessed the woman through the curtained window and paused for a few seconds before leaving the confessional. He got everything ready for the twelve o'clock mass and told the sacristan to make sure there were no other parishioners inside the church and then to close up. In the entrance hall, he patted the heads of two children playing ball-and-stick, and then, beneath the scorching sun, he crossed the street. The rectory greeted him with that damp mustiness that was ruining his voice. Using the remote control, he searched for the twenty-four-hour news channel. Confirmed: Joaquín López was dead. He watched the news for five minutes as if to convince himself that it was really true, and then he turned off the TV. He went into the kitchen and prepared himself a nice, sweet cup of aguapanela. After gulping it down, he headed off to his room, knelt beside his bed, and, with his gaze fixed on the carved cedarwood crucifix, he prayed fifteen Ave Marias with tremendous devotion. [End Page 36] TRANSLATOR'S NOTE Translating Violence and Silence by D. P. Snyder VIOLENCE AND SILENCE: a slant rhyme. Two sides of the same tarnished coin. The impact of fist on flesh, the pop of gunfire on a provincial street. Missing persons and the thundering silence of impunity. Octavio Escobar Giraldo explores this interplay of violence and silence in "Penance," the short story I've translated for this issue of World Literature Today and the first work by the award-winning Colombian writer to be published in English. For me, the magic and darkness of "Penance" lies in the way Escobar Giraldo offers a compelling portrait of the scars of social violence through the depiction of tranquil, everyday scenes. About two hundred thousand people died in the civil war (1946–64), a period Colombians simply call The Violence. The ongoing internal armed conflict (1964–present) is an asymmetric war between the government, rightist paramilitaries, drug traffickers, and leftist guerrilla groups. Since April 2021, extrajudicial killings by police are on the rise, the majority of these in the mountainous center of the country where the author's hometown, Manizales, is located. Escobar Giraldo's novels are in the noir tradition of Chandler and Onetti, although they are not detective fiction as such: Saide (1995; winner, Premio Nacional Crónica Negra), Destinos intermedios (2010), and his latest, Cada oscura tumba (2022), are linked by characters, locations—and violent deaths. Escobar Giraldo is a professor at...

Gendered Violence as Revelation in John le Carré’s <em>The Night Manager</em>

Gendered Violence as Revelation in John le Carré’s <em>The Night Manager</em>

Gatekeepers of Noir: The Paradoxical Internationalization of the French Crime Fiction Field

The French noir tradition is supposed to dominate the French market of crime fiction, regardless of the growing success of French and non-French thrillers in France. Yet in the last two decades, the French literary crime fiction market has been marked by the arrival of non-French European authors. By combining a quantitative and qualitative approach to publishing series, translations, prizes and festivals, this article highlights the transnational dimension of the French market independently from a spontaneous methodological nationalism encouraged by the reception discourses.

Frasier: A Film Noir Comedy

:Frasier, a television series (1993–2004), evolved from the film noir tradition, but as a comedy rather than as tragedy. This also represents the tendency of television to mute the existential crisis that many film noir elements surround.

Checklist of Welty Scholarship 2019

Checklist of Welty Scholarship 2019 Catherine H. Chengges This checklist is based on current listings in online bibliographies and research done through Carlson Library at the University of Toledo and on helpful information provided by publishers. Useful databases included Ebsco (Academic Search Complete), FirstSearch (WorldCat, WorldCat Dissertations and Theses), and ProQuest (DAI). 1. Bibliographies Chengges, Catherine H. "Checklist of Welty Scholarship 2017–2018." Eudora Welty Review, vol. 11, 2019, pp. 125–30. 2. Works by Welty "Eudora Welty." Die Paris Review Interviews 03, edited by Alexandra von Steffes, Lilienfeld Verlag, 2019, pp. unknown. [German Translation of "The Art of Fiction XLVII: Eudora Welty," Interview with Linda Kuehl 1972, also in Conversations with Eudora Welty, edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, pp. 74–91] "Eudora Welty (1978)." Interview with Jeanne Rolfe Nostrandt, Interviews from the Edge: 50 Years of Conversations about Writing and Resistance, edited by Mark Yakich and John Biguenet, Bloomsbury Academic, 2019, pp. 79–96. [Also in More Conversations with Eudora Welty, edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, pp. 14–30. Also briefly p. 4, 134] "Letter from Eudora Welty to Elizabeth Bowen, August 1951." Eudora Welty Review, vol. 11, 2019, pp. 5–8. "Photographs, 2019." Eudora Welty Review, vol. 11, 2019, pp. 9–10. "Review of Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen, 1938." Eudora Welty Review, vol. 11, 2019, pp. 1–3. 3. Books Pollack, Harriet. New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race. UP of Mississippi, 2019. [See contributions below by Agner, Donaldson, Ford, Fuller, Griffith, Lumumba, Mark, McMahand and Murphy, Pollack, Taylor, Trefzer, and Warfield] [End Page 251] 4. Essays Agner, Jacob. "Welty's Moonlighting Detective: Whiteness and Welty's Subversion of the American Noir Tradition in 'The Demonstrators.'" New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race, edited by Harriet Pollack, UP of Mississippi, 2019, pp. 189–213. Baargavi, K. "Application of Sigmund Freud's Psychoanalytical Theory in Eudora Welty's Selected Short Stories." Indian Review of World Literature in English, vol. 15, 2019, pp. 45–47. ["Clytie," "A Piece of News"] Bailey, Tracey. "Two Mississippi Writers: Collection Analysis on the Works of Eudora Welty and William Faulkner in Two- and Four-Year Colleges in Mississippi." Mississippi Libraries, vol. 82, no. 1, 2019, pp. 10–17. Balken, Mackenzie. "Seeing Self Otherwise: Orphaned Otherness and the Power of Narrative in Eudora Welty's 'Moon Lake.'" South Central Review, vol. 36, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1–18. Basseler, Michael. "Epistemological Uncertainty and Knowledge of Maturation in Stories of Initiation: Sherwood Anderson's 'I Want to Know Why,' Eudora Welty's 'A Visit of Charity' and 'A Memory,' and Junot Diaz's 'Ysrael.'" An Organon of Life Knowledge: Genres and Functions of the Short Story in North America, Transcript Verlag, 2019, pp. 141–62. ———. "Gerontophobia, Ageism, and the Wisdom of Later Life in Stories of Aging: Willa Cather's 'Old Mrs. Harris' and Eudora Welty's 'Old Mr. Marblehall.'" An Organon of Life Knowledge: Genres and Functions of the Short Story in North America, Transcript Verlag, 2019, pp. 195–216. Berger, Dianne. "Eudora Welty's Family Elegies: One Writer's Beginnings and The Optimist's Daughter." Eudora Welty Review, vol. 11, 2019, pp. 77–81. Betts, Doris. "'Where Is the Voice Coming From?' By Eudora Welty." Why I Like This Story, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, Camden House, 2019, pp. 43–50. Bezbradica, Viktorija. "Eudora Welty's Cyclical Temporality: Intersections among Memoir, Nonfiction, and Fiction." Eudora Welty Review, vol. 11, 2019, pp. 83–90. [One Writer's Beginnings, The Optimist's Daughter, The Eye of the Story] Bloom, Harold. "Eudora Welty (1909–2001)." The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon, edited by David Mikics, Library of America, 2019, pp. 285–94. ["A Still Moment," "The Burning"] Brandon, Caroline. "2018 Eudora Welty Research Fellow Report: Revisions and Revelations in A Curtain of Green and Other Stories." Eudora Welty Review, vol. 11, 2019, pp. 115–23. Crews, Elizabeth. "'The Still-Existing Parts of Life,' Part I: The Early Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Mary Louise Aswell." Eudora Welty Review, vol. 11, 2019, pp. 33–46. Currey, Mason. "Eudora Welty." Daily Rituals: Women at Work. Alfred A. Knopf, 2019, pp. 290–92. Donaldson, Susan V. "Faltering Narrative: Eudora Welty's 'The Burning...

L.A. Private Eyes by Dahlia Schweitzer (review)

Reviewed by: L.A. Private Eyes by Dahlia Schweitzer Matthew Sorrento Dahlia Schweitzer L.A. Private Eyes Rutgers University Press, 2019. 188 pages. $17.95 The loner-turned-criminal holds an important place in the noir tradition – think of Fred McMurray as Walter Neff in Double Indemnity (1944). When such character types are central to a film, viewers get a sense of their psychology and unique perspective on crime, leading us to root for them and learn more about their motivations. But the private eye, in other noirs like The Big Sleep (1946), slowly unravels a criminal undertaking to reveal the truth. This "unofficial" avenger, who works separately from the police, the subject of distrust in many films noir, detects with more instinct and willpower than logic. Noir on page and screen has its share of New York stories and even some set in London (1950's Night and the City), Vienna (1949's The Third Man), and beyond the city. But Los Angeles, at the end of the American "frontier," has yielded the ideal environs for the private eye, in a bleak "desert" city with plenty of real-life crime as inspiration. With noir still a hotly debated genre, Dahlia Schweitzer takes a welcome approach in L.A. Private Eyes to a subset of the style. Some standout short monographs on the crime genre of late have looked at its subgenres: for example, Prison Movies by Kevin Kehrwald and Stings, Grifts, Hustles and the Long Con by Amy Sargeant. Scwheitzer's detailed look at this central figure of noir helps to clarify the investigator's point of view and its effects on the narrative. The concept of Los Angeles in the minds of readers and viewers stretches far beyond that of the actual place and its inhabitants. Through a century of popular culture, it has become a city of "memory" inspiring Vincent Brook to describe it as a land of "Smoke and Mirrors."17 As noted by Edward Dimendberg, the actual city consists of sprawling neighborhoods reflecting 20th-century growth more than city centers and neighborhood design. As the "the ultimate example of a city sans planner" that reflects chaos,18 it has served as an ultimate setting of mystery and corruption to be unlocked by its fictional gumshoes. Chapter One asserts appropriately that "noir was defined by Los Angeles, and Los Angeles was defined by noir" (13). In surveying the early-20th-century tensions of the city, the book addresses not just the famous murders, but ethnic and cultural conflicts like the "Zoo Suit Riots," a fight between 11 sailors and Mexican youths that resulted in 500 Latinos and blacks suspiciously arrested (17). In finishing Chapter One, which cites L.A. Confidential (1997) to reflect the early-century, the author comments on the important myth of reinvention sold by the city, which fueled much of its movie history. The notable fictional private eyes of Los Angeles (Philip Marlowe, Mike Hammer, among others) and their rough methods underscore the city's complexity and confusion. Chapter Two backtracks to cover the history of the detective story. The discussion, perhaps predictable for some, takes a suitable approach for an introductory text, and Schweitzer offers some important clarifications about the development of the hardboiled private detective versus the earlier "cozy" ones. Of importance is 1920s Black Mask writer-turned-novelist Carroll John Daly and his New York detective Race Williams, who predates Dashiell Hammett's Continental OP and coined several hard-boiled standards: "The police don't like me. The crooks don't like me. … My ethics are my own" (quoted from 1927's "The Snarl of the Beast," 36). These stories came naturally to the soundwaves and screens with "intentional synergy" between writers and related media forms (39). The author also notes how even criminal-centered classic Los Angeles noirs like Double Indemnity use a "suitable proxy" [End Page 31] (40) for the private eye, like Edward G. Robinson's Barton Keyes. Schweitzer notes Raymond Chandler's advice from "Twelve Notes on the Mystery Story" (published posthumously in 1976) to provide her own primer for mystery writers. Again, she teases out important points from familiar material: "the most effective way to...

“That Old Black Magic”: Noir and Music in Juan Díaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido’s Blacksad

Juan Diaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido’s Blacksad is a comic series that evokes the noir tradition through thematic and visual callbacks to noir films and comics. As they use noir tropes, the comics illuminate the tensions in both noir and comics. Yet, Blacksad stands out as a liminal text that simultaneously references and reverses traditional noir themes. One often-overlooked noir trope is the inclusion of music in each comic album. Blacksad has often been analysed as a purely visual text. However, the inclusion of music enhances the text as the songs themselves create a layered meaning in the work that is relevant to the styles present in both comics and film noir. The music enhances the intertextual and noir references embedded in Blacksad, both building the world around the story and enhancing the storytelling of an inherently ‘silent’ medium.

L.A. Confidential as a Re-Creation of American Noir Tradition

<p>Elementy literatury hard-boiled i filmu noir są obecne we współczesnej literaturze i mediach wizualnych, ale motywy i postacie z klasycznych tekstów noir zostały odkryte na nowo. Artykuł udowadnia, że film L.A. Confidential może być postrzegany jako odtworzenie amerykańskiej tradycji noir, a powieść Jamesa Ellroya zaklasyfikowana jako literatura hard-boiled. Autor analizuje postacie detektywów przedstawione zarówno w książce, jak i w filmie oraz bada dzieło w kontekście retronoir, skupiając uwagę na postaci femme fatale, roli miasta i sposobie przedstawienia brutalności.</p>

Dwelling in La ciudad ausente: Piglia, Heidegger and Literary Experience

Dwelling in La ciudad ausente: Piglia, Heidegger and Literary Experience Erik Larson Noir detective fiction is a clear literary corollary to Heideggerian Being-in-the-world. Rather than privilege the abstract thought of the Cartesian tradition, Heidegger emphasizes our gut know-how as we navigate and interact with our environs, not unlike the detective of film noir who follows his instincts while maneuvering through an urban underworld. For Heidegger, thought coexists with phenomenological experience. It has less to do with rational interpretation and more to do with a “care” for our surroundings, or the “world” into which we are thrown. Heidegger emphasizes the very condition that allows one to exist with and through the object, to be with other entities and engage with them. This is similar to the anti-hero of film and roman noir, whose physical attraction to the femme fatale is the point of departure of any case, not to mention his affective and material liabilities to other gangsters. And, like Marlowe, whose union with Los Angeles is of an almost mystical nature, attuned as he is to the very heart beat of the city, Heidegger’s phenomenology is an experience of space as one is there, in the world, practicing with it. Ricardo Piglia, whose novel La ciudad ausente (1992) will be the focal point of this essay, presents a similar reading of the North American novela negra. Piglia claims that the detective is viscerally thrown into the action: “en la novela negra no parece haber otro criterio de verdad que la experiencia: el investigador se lanza, ciegamente, al encuentro de los hechos, se deja llevar por los acontecimientos y su investigación produce fatalmente nuevos crímenes; una cadena de acontecimientos cuyo efecto es el descubrimiento, el desciframiento” (Crítica y ficción 68). As we move to Piglia’s own literary noir novels, it would seem that this experiential, material component is utterly absent. According to Idelber Avelar, for example, “Literature for Piglia has little to do with experience, if one takes experience as the anecdotal content of a personal trajectory, the mass of lived moments in all their banality. In a word, literature’s material is not experience as Erlebnis, lo vivido, the raw collection of empirie” (100). However, if we place Piglia’s novels into the hardboiled world of deception and subterfuge, we can identify a kind of experience within the very slippage of language and interpretation. This said, experience and interaction with the surrounding world continue to underlie novels like La ciudad ausente, Nombre falso (1975) or Respiración artificial (1980), but they occur through textuality. Whether through the stolen identities, the double agents, or the cracked mirror reflections, the author teases out [End Page 2] the textual play that is ubiquitous in the noir tradition and brings it to the fore in his own work. Thus, he is able to posit a distinct form of Being-in-the-world, one that is made possible by inhabiting apocryphal, false and alternative narratives.1 While representation seems to take a back seat within Heidegger’s project, Piglia’s work shows us that representation and text can actually heighten our experience of the surrounding world. Inhabiting a strange text discloses other angles of praxis, conspiracies and complots, and thus reveals other corners of being that could otherwise go unnoticed. For example, in “Un pez en el hielo,” Renzi views Turin through the lens of Cesar Pavese’s diary. In La ciudad ausente, Junior, Elena, and Macedonio are colonized by relatos ajenos that cue them into an “absent city” within the city. If Being-in-the-World is for Heidegger a mode of dwelling that is attuned to those zones outside of traditional Cartesian thought, Piglia’s work signals such experience through the simulacra and foreign narratives that shift one’s perception and material engagement with their milieu. As we will see in this essay, the act of inhabiting alternate storylines and simulacra becomes a mode of “being” in La ciudad ausente. In his seminal work, Being and Time, Martin Heidegger ambitiously sought to reposition the whole of western philosophy away from the central consideration of thought, onto what precedes mental activity: the fundamental...

Being and Text: Piglia's Nombre falso as Literary Noir

This article examines Ricardo Piglia's use of the noir tradition in his short novella Nombre Falso in order to map the interdependence of the abstract and the material. Piglia's concept of literary crime allows us to triangulate the convergence of thought, literature or exchange value on one hand, with corporeality or material production on the other. Whether we are talking about textual burglary, stolen identities, or the fiction of capital, literary crime engenders a material, bodily experience. While plenty of scholarship surrounding Piglia's work has zeroed in on his engagement with the literary tradition, I try to show how literature becomes a mode of being and of existing. Piglia's characters take on false identities and claim foreign texts as their own, and thus find themselves out of place within their immediate storyline. The fact that they position themselves against their symbolic environment cues a sort of bodily tension, which, I argue, is a key part of Piglia's notion of literary experience and crime. The author takes all of the literary subterfuge so common to the noir genre through the stolen identities, the impostors and the lies in order to posit a sense of material experience. In a second step, I show how money and capitalist ideology also unchain a similarly tangible engagement with the material world. The seductive properties of exchange value beget a kind of material desire that is key for understanding Piglia's view of crime within capitalism.

Baltimore in The Wire and Los Angeles in The Shield: Urban Landscapes in American Drama Series

The Shield (FX 2002-08) and The Wire (HBO 2002-08) are two of the most ever critically acclaimed TV-shows and they both can be seen as the finest developed film noir proposals produced in television. The Wire transcends the cop-show genre by offering a multilayered portrait of the whole city of Baltimore: from police work to drug dealing, getting through stevedores’ union corruption, tricks of local politics, problems of the school system and some unethical journalism practices. On the other, The Shield offers a breathtaking cop-show that features in the foreground the moral ambiguity that characterizes the noir genre. Both series display complementary realist strategies (a neorealist aesthetic in The Wire; a cinema verite pastiche in The Shield) that highlight the importance of city landscape in their narrative. Baltimore and Los Angeles are portrayed not only as a dangerous and ruined physical places, but are also intertwined with moral and political issues in contemporary cities, such as race, class, political corruption, social disintegration, economical disparities, the limitations of the system of justice, the failure of the American dream and so on. The complex and expanded narrative of The Wire and The Shield, as Dimemberg has written for film noir genre, “remains well attuned to the violently fragmented spaces and times of the late-modern world”. Therefore, this article will focus on how The Wire and The Shield (and some of their TV heirs, such as Southland and Justified) reflect and renew several topics related to the city in the film noir tradition: the sociopolitical effects of showing the ruins of the centripetal industrial metropolis, the inferences of filming in actual places, the dramatic presence of what Auge coined as “no-places”, the bachelardian opposition between home and city, or the streets as an urban jungle where danger lurks in every corner.

America Is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer CultureErikDussere. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture Erik Dussere. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.Erik Dussere's Is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture, winner of the 2014 Edgar Award for Best Critical/Biographical Work, examines literary and cinematic noir from the 1940s to the present in terms of the confrontation it stages between two versions of America (4), one defined by consumer culture and the other in opposition to it. According to Dussere, it is this animating ideological core (185), rather than specific set of visual and narrative conventions, that gives the category of noir coherence.The study opens with an analysis of postwar hardboiled fiction and film noir that sets up this tension between consumer culture and authenticity. A section on Raymond Chandler examines how the hardboiled detective hero comes to embody an ideal of American authenticity: classless, solitary, and autonomous. This figure stands outside of mainstream consumer society, sardonically observing its degradations.The book's examination of cinematic postwar noir focuses especially on visual representations of confrontation between commerce and authenticity. For example, in his analysis of the iconic Jerry's Market scenes in Double Indemnity, the supermarket functions as synecdoche for American consumer culture, its blandness serving as counterpoint to the deviant, exciting lives of the story's criminal protagonists.Dussere continues to track this opposition between mainstream consumerism and marginalized authenticity through conspiracy texts of the Sixties and Seventies, where the investigator protagonists of thrillers such as The Parallax View are rendered ineffectual witnesses to pervasive corruption. He distinguishes these conspiracy narratives from those of Pynchon's California trilogy, beginning with The Crying of Lot 49, which retains the idea of an authentic American elsewhere-one that lurks just beneath society's surfaces, that is populated by those who define themselves in opposition to mainstream America, and that Pynchon aligns with a homegrown Left tradition (133).The book continues its exploration of this Two Americas model (161) with comparison of Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat by the Door and Chester Himes's Plan B, in which the black ghetto, existing apart from the suburban mainstream, is figured as an alternative space that concentrates black frustration (174). …

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America Is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture by Erik Dussere (review)

Reviewed by: America Is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture by Erik Dussere Christopher Breu Erik Dussere. America Is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 2013. 299pp. There are as many narratives of noir’s development as there are definitions of noir. Notoriously difficult to define in positive qualities, noir has variously been described as a genre; a mood; a subspecies of crime and detective narratives (filmic or novelistic); or, as I have argued elsewhere, a negative deformation or volatilization of other genres. Even as its stylistic roots in European movements like expressionism and existentialism have been acknowledged, noir is often described as a distinctly American phenomenon. Thus, the negativity and darkness ascribed to noir are seen as part of a negative exceptionalism, a homegrown critique of the culture and politics of the US that is simultaneously its distinctive product. While there has been a range of recent work on noir as a distinctly global phenomenon (Jennifer Fay and Justus Nieland’s Film Noir: Hard-Boiled Modernity and the Cultures of Globalization, for example), the negative exceptionalist paradigm central to a great deal of writing on noir is still very much alive and well. One can glean as much from reading Erik Dussere’s America Is Elsewhere. Both the power and the limitations of Dussere’s book can be linked to its redeployment of this negative exceptionalist paradigm. His argument hinges on the opposition between postwar consumer culture and notions of authenticity he sees at the heart of noir: “what I have been calling the ‘dialectic’ of authenticity and consumer culture staged by the texts in the noir tradition is a crucial, perhaps a constitutive, component of American self-understanding in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries” (247). As this emphasis on “American self-understanding” suggests, Dussere’s argument is cast in the dialectics of American identity central to an older tradition of American studies that runs from, say, Perry Anderson through Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin to Sacvan Bercovitch. Indeed, a careful and rich reading of Trilling’s concept of authenticity underpins Dussere’s negative exceptionalist account of the opposition between the “two Americas,” in which the two versions of the nation “occupy the same geographical space, with the visible and consumerist republic twinned by the alternative, dispossessed America beneath” (132). While Dussere cites more recent American studies scholars, such as Donald Pease and Deborah Madsen, who present more searching critiques of the rhetoric of exceptionalism that challenge the fantasy of a singular American self, his model of the “two Americas” harkens back to Bercovitch’s model of American disensus, in which the jeremiad is the dominant form of expression. [End Page 158] Part of Dussere’s investment in the concept of American authenticity is bound up with the version of noir his book chooses to narrate. One way to think about the noir narrative is in terms of different schools centered on paradigmatic writers or practices of filmmaking. Thus, we can talk about the James M. Cain school of noir; the Dashiell Hammett school; the Chester Himes school; the Patricia Highsmith school; the classic Hollywood school; the French New Wave school; the Nikkatsu school; the schools associated with international noir writers like Natsuo Kirnio, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, and Stieg Larsson; and others. Each of these schools carries within it a set of assumptions about noir that shapes the story told by the critic. Thus, if the critic’s account is narrated in relationship to the Hollywood, Hammett, or Taibo schools, she will tend to read a continuity between narratives that focus on the figure of the hard-boiled detective and petty criminals, while a critic working within the Cain, Highsmith, or Kirino schools might make a much stronger distinction between hard-boiled fiction (privileging the figure of the hard-boiled detective) and noir proper (which tends to narrate the lives of petty criminals and two-time losers who wind up on the wrong side of the law). The national or international dimensions of the narrative would also be shaped by the school the critic affiliates with as well as who he includes within the school...

When Noir Meets Nonfiction

This essay examines three twentieth-century practitioners of the Los Angeles variant of Noir nonfiction: the radical historian and architectural critic Mike Davis; the fiction writer, screenwriter, and journalist Joan Didion; and the novelist, reporter, and memoirist John Gregory Dunne. “Noir nonfiction” is meant to refer to a crossover mode that exports elements from the Noir tradition—particularly, an ethos of suspicion that often expresses populist anger at public corruption, elite hypocrisy, and suburban ennui—into an experimental mode of reportage that challenges the predominantly realist norms of mainstream journalism. The essay begins by examining Dunne’s fictional True Confessions (1977) and his report on Cesar Chavez’s farmworkers’ campaign, Delano (1967); moves to Davis’s history of Los Angeles, City of Quartz (1992); and closes with Didion’s “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” (1966).

America is elsewhere: the noir tradition in the age of consumer culture

Acknowledgments Introduction i. Authenticity Effects ii. Out of the Past, Into the Supermarket Part I: Postwar Spaces, Postwar Men Ch 1. Last Chance Texaco: Gas Station Noir Ch 2. The Publishing Class: Detectives and Executives in Noir Fiction Part II: Maps of Conspiracy Ch 3. The Gumshoe Vanishes: Conspiracy Film in the Sixties Era Ch 4. Flirters, Deserters, Wimps and Pimps: Pynchon's Two Americas Ch 5. Black Ops: Ghetto Space and Counterconspiracy Part III: Postmodernism and Authenticity Ch 6. Postmodern Authenticity, or, Cyberpunk Ch 7. The Space of the Clock: The Corporation as Genre in The Hudsucker Proxy Conclusion Notes Bibliography

Everybody's Noir Humanism: Chester Himes, Lonely Crusade , and The Quality of Hurt

Like Chester Himes, James Baldwin helped invent the noir sensibility at midcentury. In 1949, a young Baldwin published Everybody's Protest Novel, a famous indictment of so-called fiction and its most influential, most monstrous progeny, Richard Wright's Native Son (1940). Critics generally regard this essay as a rejection of the Marxist politics of Wright's naturalism--its insuperable confusion of literature and sociology--and an endorsement of psychological in the Jamesian mode (Baldwin 19). Baldwin's verdict? Fewer pamphlets, more novels. But the essay also crafts a surprising noir archive of sentimental politics, one that aligns the theological of Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and the tragedy of Bigger Thomas with liberal Hollywood's postwar penchant for problem pictures and the lurid prose of James M. Cain (Baldwin 15). As Baldwin stumps for fiction devoted to the disquieting complexity of the human being, he condemns the violence done to humanity by the spurious emotion of sentimentality joining far-flung cultural products: Both Gentleman's Agreement [dir. Elia Kazan, 1947] and The Postman Always Rings Twice [dir. Tay Garnett, 1946] exemplify this terror of the human being, the determination to cut him down to size. And in Uncle Tom's Cabin we find the foreshadowing of both (Baldwin 15, 14, 16). Unlike properly psychological fiction, Baldwin insists, novels are fantasies, connecting nowhere with reality, sentimental; in exactly the same sense that such movies as The Best Years of Our Lives [dir. William Wyler, 1946] or the works of James M. Cain are fantasies.... The aim has now become to reduce all Americans to the compulsive, bloodless dimensions of a guy named Joe (20). In joining the violent inhumanity of nineteenth-century novels like Stowe's to that of their hard-boiled descendants like Wright and Cain, and to Hollywood's new glut of anonymous, statistically average Joes, Baldwin anticipates recent critical arguments about the shared sentimental genealogy of the hard-boiled novel and the film noir--the despairing turn towards sociological realism in postwar Hollywood that French film critics discovered on the heels of the Nazi Occupation, and at the dawn of the American Century (14). (1) Noir is of course an infamously fuzzy category, a broad discursive formation that consolidated at midcentury, but stretched long before and after its French invention. Paradoxically, the terms of Baldwin's essay sharpen this point by obscuring the matter even further: in 1949, the fiction of Cain, Stowe, and Wright, and the films of Wyler and Kazan, would be perceived as being part of a widespread, vaguely noir sensibility, extending across media, and defined for Baldwin by a shared inhumanity--a noir humanism. In this essay, I consider Himes's own social protest novel Lonely Crusade (1947) in a broader constellation of noir humanism--a phrase I use to describe a particular convergence of psychologizing tendencies at midcentury. Noir humanism yielded a universalizing, quasi-anthropological picture of the human condition as marked by pervasive emotional insecurity, and in Himes's work more particularly, by the violence of sentimental categorization and the exclusionary political formulas of postwar U. S. democracy. Himes's place in the noir tradition is well established, secured by the French publication of his Harlem Domestic cycle in Gallimard's legendary Serie noire, and critically cemented by many superb recent critical studies. (2) Less well understood is the role of Lonely Crusade in Himes's noir vision as crystallized in the postwar period. Often described as Himes's most accomplished or complex novel, a damning kind of praise that has probably helped consign the book to critical oblivion, Lonely Crusade is a messy book, ideologically speaking. Himes put more bluntly in The Quality of Hurt: Everyone hated it.... The left hated it, the right hated it, Jews hated it, blacks hated it (221). …

The Philosophy of neo-noir

Film noir - a cycle of American films from the 1940s and '50s - is characterized not only by a constant opposition of light and shadow and a disruptive compositional balance of frames and scenes, but also by dark, foreboding characters and plots and an overriding sense of alienation and moral ambiguity. Noir films reflect the sense of loss, fragmentation, and nihilism at the heart of the human condition in the twentieth century. Although the classic film noir period ended in the late 1950s, its impact on more recent films has been profound. While typically not black and white, these new films incorporate the noir sensibility of alienation, pessimism, moral ambivalence, and disorientation. This sensibility is obvious in films such as Blade Runner, Reservoir Dogs, Chinatown, and Memento. Until now, little scholarly attention has been paid to the unique philosophical conventions of the widely popular neo-noir genre. In Philosophy of Neo-Noir, editor Mark T. Conard and other contributors explore the philosophical foundations of neo-noir, using the films to discuss and explain traditional philosophical ideas as well. The themes and topics covered include justice and moral corruption; problems of memory and identity; human nature; space, time, and subjectivity; crime and punishment; pain and redemption; and spiritual transcendence. Conard argues that neo-noir films have benefited as censorship has relaxed, giving current filmmakers a rich noir tradition from which to draw.

Career movies: American business and the success mystique

Introduction From American Dream to Success Mystique Defining the Genre and Other Theoretical Approaches Organizational Structure Chapter 1. The Classical Corporate Executive Film Executive Promotion and Family Allegiance Corporate Nationalism Shoring Up the New Male Bureaucrat Beyond the Corporate-Family Equation Chapter 2. The Emergence of the Career Woman From Shamed Working Moms in Noir and Classical Melodrama to Embarrassed Ones in Comedy The 1970s and After: Transitional Consciousness Gives Way to Clones, Comedic Supermoms, and Competitive Saboteurs Consumerism's Legacy of Narcissism and Displacement Chapter 3. The Entrepreneurial Impulse Surveying the Agony and Ecstasy of Ownership Immigrant and Racial Issues in Family Businesses Entrepreneurial Femmes Fatales in the Film Noir Tradition Eroticized Success Mastery and Repetition Compulsion Chapter 4. Huckster Foreplay: The Promotion Industry From Early Cinema Hucksters to Corporate Media Demagogues Directing Desire in the Postwar Classical Film Evident Resistance in the Transitional Era The Entrepreneurialization of Employment and Other Promotional Realities in the 1980s and 1990s Chapter 5. Working in American Televirtuality From Network TV to Cultic Space and Cultural Metaphor The Drive to Virtuality in Production and Consumption Reception and Simulational Identity in Cyberspace Conclusion List of Film Stills Notes Bibliography Index