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"Death threats Fiction."
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The scarlet slipper mystery
Nancy Drew comes to the aid of the owners of a local dancing school when they receive an anonymous note threatening their lives.
Book
Dangerous liaisons; Unless the Threat of Death Is Behind Them Hard- Boiled Fiction and Film Noir John T. Irwin Johns Hopkins University Press: 290 pp., $45
Since then, there has undoubtedly been more heavy-duty writing about noir than about any other genre -- which includes disputes about whether it really is a genre. This endlessly fascinates both academics and film buffs, in part because so many of the films of noir's classic era, which [Paul Schrader] dates from 1941 to 1953, are so seductively realized -- well-written, handsomely directed (all those shadows, rain-wet streets, blinking neon signs) and played with such harsh authority, often by otherwise quite ordinary actors. Schrader says, inarguably, that in that period almost every serious American dramatic movie contained some noir elements. Yet, for all the critical-historical attention lavished on noir, the task of analyzing the genre hasn't advanced much beyond what Schrader offered 35 years ago. That's certainly true of \"Unless the Threat of Death Is Behind Them,\" which considers in numbing detail five hard-boiled novels (\"The Maltese Falcon,\" \"The Big Sleep,\" \"Double Indemnity,\" \"High Sierra\" and \"Night Has a Thousand Eyes\"), each the work of a major first-generation tough-guy novelist (Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, W.R. Burnett and Cornell Woolrich, respectively) and the movies derived from them. The author, John T. Irwin, a humanities professor at Johns Hopkins University, basically has just one (rather paltry) idea about these books: namely, that they are about men who are forced to choose between work and love -- and invariably opt for the former. That formulation applies neatly to the Hammett and Chandler novels, less so to the Burnett and Cain works and not at all to Woolrich's. His novel is not really hard-boiled (except, on occasion, rhetorically), and its film version has almost nothing to do with its source. Of course, noir is capacious. Another excellent early scholar of the genre, Raymond Durgnat, listed 11 thematic categories encompassed by noir, not all of them sexually driven. In arguing that noir was more a matter of tone than plot -- that's what makes definitions so difficult -- Schrader laid out four \"conditions\" for the genre's creation. Two of them -- a literary root in easily adaptable hard-boiled fiction (the matter that concerns Irwin) and the presence in Hollywood of European emigre directors well-versed in an expressionistic style -- seem unquestionable. Two of them, I think, require a bit more comment. Schrader correctly cited the drive for greater realism (neorealism in Italy, semi-documentary in the United States) that was powerfully influential on noir. If he were solely concerned with psychology -- the sudden emergence of manipulative women clawing at strangely passive men whose wise-guy patter belies their victimized status -- I'd have no quarrel with him. But if, as he contends, film noir was a stylistic itch in search of suitable subject matter to scratch, I think he slightly misses the point.
Newspaper Article
Scandals of Misreading: Serial Killer Shockers and Imaginative Resistance
In the winter of 1991, the frenzied scandal around Bret Easton Ellis’s serial killer smash American Psycho overshadowed another, no less serious literary controversy. Published less than two months after Ellis’s blockbuster, Dennis Cooper’s transgressive queer classic Frisk may have been largely ignored in mainstream cultural outlets, but in the queer community the scandal was deadly serious. Seemingly connecting queer sexuality with serial murder and pedophilia, the novel incited intensely angry demands for censorship. The controversy culminated in a very public death threat against Cooper from members of Queer Nation, a gay rights group known for its shock tactics. The critical response has mostly dismissed the scandals surrounding the novels as based on a particular kind of misreading or misinterpretation. Both works use similar narrative strategies to shock and scandalize their audience but aim to mitigate this response through the strategic use of unreliable narration. While scholars have often made the argument that the violence in the novels should be interpreted as mere fantasies of their unreliable narrators, this kind of nuanced interpretation was wholly absent in the scandalized response to the novels. The common critical defense, however, is itself based on a misunderstanding of the scandals. Fictionality and narrative reliability as such have little to do with the responses of imaginative resistance and moral disgust prompted by the representation of extreme violence. In this article, I analyze and compare the public and scholarly receptions of the novels, highlighting how scholarly discourse has often overlooked how the novels anticipated and aimed to incite the scandalized public response they ultimately provoked.
Journal Article
Why people die in novels: testing the ordeal simulation hypothesis
What is fiction about, and what is it good for? An influential family of theories sees fiction as rooted in adaptive simulation mechanisms. In this view, our propensity to create and enjoy narrative fictions was selected and maintained due to the training that we get from mentally simulating situations relevant to our survival and reproduction. We put forward and test a precise version of this claim, the “ordeal simulation hypothesis”. It states that fictional narrative primarily simulates “ordeals”: situations where a person’s reaction might dramatically improve or decrease her fitness, such as deadly aggressions, or decisions on long-term matrimonial commitments. Experience does not prepare us well for these rare, high-stakes occasions, in contrast with situations that are just as fitness-relevant but more frequent (e.g., exposure to pathogens). We study mortality in fictional and non-fictional texts as a partial test for this view. Based on an analysis of 744 extensive summaries of twentieth century American novels of various genres, we show that the odds of dying (in a given year) are vastly exaggerated in fiction compared to reality, but specifically more exaggerated for homicides as compared to suicides, accidents, war-related, or natural deaths. This evidence supports the ordeal simulation hypothesis but is also compatible with other accounts. For a more specific test, we look for indications that this focus on death, and in particular on death caused by an agent, is specific to narrative fiction as distinct from other verbal productions. In a comparison of 10,810 private letters and personal diary entries written by American women, with a set of 811 novels (also written by American women), we measure the occurrence of words related to natural death or agentive death. Private letters and diaries are as likely, or more likely, to use words relating to natural or agentive death. Novels written for an adult audience contain more words relating to natural deaths than do letters (though not diary entries), but this is not true for agentive death. Violent death, in spite of its clear appeal for fiction, does not necessarily provide a clear demarcation point between fictional and non-fictional content.
Journal Article
dementia, care and time in post-war Japan: \The Twilight Years, Memories of Tomorrow\ and \Pecoross' Mother and Her Days\
As the number of people affected by dementia increases rapidly, dementia has been transformed into an epidemic which endangers global health and wealth, and many populations are now living in what Jain terms a time of prognosis, in fear of the disease. Through its strong association with ageing and memory loss, dementia is conceived of as a linear decline into loss of self and death, and those with dementia as other. More significantly, imagined as a threat that signifies both a loss of able-bodied workforce and a large population dependent on care and support, dementia inevitably feeds into the 'crisis-of-care' narrative that is prominent in many ageing societies. With one of the fastest ageing populations in the world, and an extremely low birth rate, the dementia prognosis is particularly acute in Japan and dementia is strongly linked to the idea of a 'care crisis'. This situation has produced an increasing number of cultural representations of dementia and care and this paper considers three of these cultural texts, all rooted in the historical and cultural contexts in which they were produced: the novel The Twilight Years; the film Memories of Tomorrow; and the comic book Pecoross' Mother and Her Days. The analysis concentrates upon their representations of care, seeing this as a space where the ethical relationship between self and other can be negotiated and where time with dementia can be imagined and re-imagined. The analysis of these texts from a feminist ethics perspective demonstrates the potential of popular and creative representations to interrogate and potentially expand the meanings of dementia, ageing and living in prognosis.
Journal Article
NANA SAHIB IN BRITISH CULTURE AND MEMORY
The Indian Rebellion leader Nana Sahib became Victorian Britain's most hated foreign enemy for his part in the 1857 Cawnpore massacres, in which British men, women, and children were killed after having been promised safe passage away from their besieged garrison. Facts were mixed with lurid fiction in reports which drew on villainous oriental stereotypes to depict Nana. The public appetite for vengeance was thwarted, however, by his escape to Nepal and subsequent reports of his death. These reports were widely disbelieved, and fears persisted for decades that Nana was plotting a new rebellion in the mountains. He came to be seen as both a literal and symbolic threat; the arrest of suspects across the years periodically revived the memories and the atavistic fury of the Mutiny, while his example as the Victorians' archetypal barbaric native ruler shaped broader colonial attitudes. At the same time, he influenced metropolitan perceptions of empire through the popular Mutiny fictions in which he was a larger-than-life villain. Tracing Nana's changing presence in the British collective memory over generations illustrates the tensions between metropolitan and colonial ideas of empire, and suggests the degree to which an iconic enemy figure could shape perceptions of other races.
Journal Article
The Danish Romance Play: Fair Em, Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes, and Hoffman
In this essay, I want to explore three early modern playwrights' representations of women from around the Baltic Sea as framed or conditioned by stories from classical mythology. I have explored elsewhere how allusion to classical stories works in plays explicitly set in the period when Danish invasions were a real and actual threat to England, including Anthony Brewer's The Lovesick King, Middleton's Hengist, King of Kent, Henry Burnell's Landgartha, and Hamlet and have argued that in those plays the treatment of female characters is conditioned by two paradigms: firstly the prominence and visibility of Queen Anna, the Danish wife of James VI of Scotland and I of England, and secondly - and more surprisingly - the figure of Dido. Here I focus on three plays with less deterministic chronological settings: Fair Em, Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes, and Hoffman. I argue that not only do these have elements in common but that they are also pointedly different from plays which are centred on or refer to Viking invasions. Curtis Perry has described the cultural work performed by the Danish history play as largely political, specifically in the shape of contesting ideas of hereditary royal power,2 but Fair Em, Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes, and Hoffman are all very pointedly ми-history plays.
Journal Article
The US-Iranian Cold War: From the Threat of Military Intervention to Peaceful Rapprochement
The world has witnessed an increase in US military intervention in the post-Cold War era. This study asks what drives intervention in one case rather than another. The factors contributing to a decision to strike Iran during the George W. Bush administration were identical to those of the Iraq War II, 2003. The two primary causes of war with Iraq, development of weapons of mass destruction and state sponsorship of terrorism, applied to Iran, especially during the period of 2006 to 2008. Also, a longstanding hostility toward the Islamic Republic led to the addition of regime change as a stated objective for the United States. The Bush administration was precluded from utilizing military force or a credible threat of doing so because of its overextension in Iraq and Afghanistan. We follow this historical review with an analysis of the current thaw in the US-Iranian Cold War, signified by the G5+1 nuclear agreement.
Journal Article
Bangladesh writer gets death threat over free speech views
Text of report by Bangladeshi newspaper The Daily Star website on 16 November Rajshahi: Eminent fiction writer Hasan Azizul Haque yesterday received a death threat from an unknown caller over the phone reportedly for his views on freedom of expression.
Newspaper Article