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"Raymond Chandler"
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The world of Raymond Chandler : in his own words
\"Chandler never wrote an autobiography or a memoir. Now Barry Day, making use of Chandler's novels, short stories, and letters as well as Day's ... commentary, gives us the life of 'the man with no home,' a man precariously balanced between his classical English education with its immutable values and that of a fast-evolving America during the years before the Great War, with its resulting changing vernacular. Chandler reveals what it was like to be a writer, and in particular what it was to be a writer of 'hard-boiled' fiction in what was for him 'another language'\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
From Lowbrow to Nobrow
Swirski begins with a series of groundbreaking questions about the nature of popular fiction, vindicating it as an artform that expresses and reflects the aesthetic and social values of its readers. He follows his insightful introduction to the socio-aesthetics of genre literature with a synthesis of the century long debate on the merits of popular fiction and a study of genre informed by analytic aesthetics and game theory.
eBook
The anti-landscape
There have always been some uninhabitable places, but in the last century human beings have produced many more of them. These anti-landscapes have proliferated to include the sandy wastes of what was once the Aral Sea, severely polluted irrigated lands, open pit mines, blighted nuclear zones, coastal areas inundated by rising seas, and many others. The Anti-Landscape examines the emergence of such sites, how they have been understood, and how some of them have been recovered for habitation. The anti-landscape refers both to artistic and literary representations and to specific places that no longer sustain life. This history includes T.S. Eliot's Wasteland and Cormac McCarthy's The Road as well as air pollution, recycled railway lines, photography and landfills. It links theories of aesthetics, politics, tourism, history, geography, and literature into the new synthesis of the environmental humanities. The Anti-Landscape provides an interdisciplinary appraoch that moves beyond the false duality of nature vs. culture, and beyond diagnosis and complaint to the recuparation of damaged sites into our complex heritage. -- cover verso.
BOOK
The metaphysics of detective Marlowe
The Metaphysics of Detective Marlowe: Style, Vision, Hard-Boiled Repartee, Thugs, and Death-Dealing Damsels in Raymond Chandler’s Novels is a comparative study of ‘the life and times” of an American idol, Raymond Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe. It is a bitter-sweet critical exploration, meant to redefine the exceptional cultural profile, as well as the moral and social obsessions of one of America’s eminent fictional heroes. The study paints a colorful picture of the irresistible blend of romantic blind faith and social, moral and political toughness which characterized the United States in the 1930s-40s, with the memorable throng of drug dealers, hit men, vamps, corrupt politicians, and eccentric millionaires that colonize Raymond Chandler’s work. As the only defender of truth and honor in the Californian “Waste Land,” Philip Marlowe emerges as a symbolic figure, celebrated for the unique place he holds in the American hard-boiled mythology. The volume comprises an Introduction, Marlowe Before Marlowe, and four large chapters, each focusing on the innovations and enduring strategies behind Chandler’s persuasive vision: The Doughy Mass of Depravity, A Phantasm Called Style, The Villainy Septet and Marlowe After Marlowe. As presented in this book, Philip Marlowe, ‘the metaphysical sleuth,’ is a sentimentalist of the worst type: one embarrassed to show his true feelings. He is tough, but not tough enough and, consequently, a charming loser, always defeated in his confrontations with psychopath monsters and the legions of death-dealing damsels. The Californian detective’s gentleness and callousness are endearing: the gentleness is always callous, and the callousness is barely gentle. He seems to be the survivor of an extinct species, living for and by a code of honor. He believes in the purity of desires, expressed in a nascent idiom, a kind of secret/public language that heralds the resurrection of the new hard-boiled diction. His genuine candor is perfectly expressed in the directness of his talk, a brilliant example of rhetorical tightrope walking. Philip Marlowe embodies the contradictions of the problematic modernism—half bedlam, half expressionism—of his time and ours alike. The tradition he inaugurated is consistently illustrated today by James Ellroy, Allan Guthrie, Walter Mosley, Megan Abbott or Charlie Hudson.
eBook
The Mysteries of Creative Writing
Narvaez offers insights about creative writing on mysteries theme. The author talks about experiences during creative writing class and his years of education.
Journal Article
In Dog He Trusts: Retrieving Burke's Pun from Goodall's Detective Trilogy
In this way, the symbolic violence suggested through cannibalization may be seen as the \"scapegoating\" of others or \"mortifying\" ourselves.3 I use Goodall's first detective story, which first appeared as a journal article (\"On Becoming\") around the same time as the publication of Casing a Promised Land and which \"should have been includ[ed].. .because it so clearly sets the noire detective tone\" (Goodall, \"'Writing\" 80).4 The earlier story was included in a revised form as a book chapter in Living in the Rock N Roll Mystery and in an \"expanded edition\" of Casing a Promised Land. Beyond that, the name \"Ishmael\" is a Biblical reference to one of Abraham's sons, the one who is banished to the desert, but who becomes the leader of the Arab tribes. [...]we have two Biblical allusions, one to \"the promised land,\" which is part of the title of Goodall's first book of detective stories (Casing a Promised Land), and the second to a mythological figure, Ishmael, whose descendants also figure into the story of \"the promised land.\" In this story, Goodall's detective is at his Chandlerian best: proud and heroic, aware, and \"fit for adventure\" (Chandler 18). ~When Goodall realizes that the fix is in, that he's just been a pawn in the corporate game, he notes that \"there are times in your life when even your best dog.. [...]the hierarchic order of corporate life is set up by the pun, and ends with the detective, who shares substance with his \"best dog,\" faces off-both grappling and admiring-'the \"ineffable\" god(dess). [...]Alexander remembers his first academic encounter with Goodall's book, Living in the Rock N Roll Mystery, and the reference to 'White Dog, and having a visceral response to the ideology and nomenclature of the term in his childhood experience in Southwestern Louisiana.
Journal Article
\Arabesques of the Final Pattern\: Len Deighton's Hard-Boiled Espionage Fiction
But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor-by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He talks as the man of his age talks-that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The main issue at stake, then, is twofold. First, why did Chandler's celebrated private detective of the 1940s appeal to Deighton as a prototype for his unnamed spy during the Cold War's most volatile period of ideological conflict? Second, how did Chandler's oblique plots influence Deighton's predilection for weaving intricate narratives that can be described, borrowing from The Ipcress File, as \"arabesques of the final pattern (93)?
Journal Article
The Loaded Gun: Idiomatic Language in the Works of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald
This essay explores the idiomatic writing styles of Raymond Chandler and Kenneth Millar (aka Ross Macdonald), discussing the importance of vernacular speech for establishing the credibility of the private eye and constructing a community of readers.
Journal Article
The Relation of Film, Literature, and Music: The Big Lebowski’s Soundtrack as a Means of Significance Beyond the Anglophone World
Considering films as semiotically “multitrack” texts that integrate elements from different arts —writings—, this chapter analyzes the relationship between The Big Lebowski (1998), Carter Burwell’s soundtrack selection for the film, composed mainly of preexisting songs, and Raymond Chandler’s novel The Big Sleep (1939). In such a varied soundtrack, featuring well-known names like Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, and Creedence Clearwater Revival, we can discern the meaning behind the Gipsy Kings’ cover of “Hotel California.” The reason is that, like a cover song, the double cultural background of the music styles —rock and Spanish rumba —could connect the Coen brothers’ parodic film with other cinematographic genres, such as the Spanish quinqui films, contributing to the film’s memory and significance beyond the Anglophone world.
Journal Article
Sof’town Sleuths: The Hard-Boiled Genre Goes to Jo’Burg
In an attempt to develop new constellations of world literature, this article places the writers of South Africa’s Drum generation within the orbit of the American hard-boiled genre. For a brief period in the 1950 s, Drum was home to a team of gifted writers who cut their literary teeth in the fast-paced, hard-drinking, crime-riddled streets of Sophiatown, Johannesburg’s last remaining black township. Their unique style was a blend of quick-witted Hollywood dialogue, a private detective’s street sense, and the hard-boiled aesthetic of writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Writing in English in the era of the Bantu Education Act (1953), Drum writers challenged attempts to retribalize the African natives with the counter discourse of an educated, urbanized, modern African. This article (dis)orients conventional treatments of both Drum writers and the hard-boiled tradition by tracing alternative lines of flight between seemingly disparate fields of study.
Journal Article