Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Darkly Perfect World: Colonial Adventure, Postmodernism, and American Noir

Darkly Perfect World: Colonial Adventure, Postmodernism, and American Noir

Orr, Stanley

Paperback

Literary CriticismFilm Studies

ISBN10: 0814256724
ISBN13: 9780814256725
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Published: Oct 9 2020
Pages: 260
Weight: 0.85
Height: 0.59 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Stanley Orr's Darkly Perfect World offers a large-scale historical narrative about the way American crime fiction and film have changed throughout the twentieth century. Orr argues that films noirs and noir fictions dramatize Raymond Chandler's pronouncement that Even in death, a man has a right to his own identity. Orr illuminates a noir ethos committed to authenticating alienation subjectivity managed through radical polarization of Self and Other. Distinguishing a heretofore unrecognized context for American noir, Orr demonstrates that Chandler and Dashiell Hammett arrive at this subject within and against the colonial adventure genre. While the renegades of Joseph Conrad and Louis Becke project a figure vulnerable to shifts in cultural context, the noir protagonist exemplifies alienated selfhood and often performs a continental operation against the slippages of the colonial adventurer. But even as Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, and other noir virtuosi persist with this revision of late Victorian adventure, Chester Himes, Dorothy Hughes, and John Okada experiment with hard-boiled alienation for a subversion of noir that resonates throughout literary postmodernism. In their respective avant-garde novels, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, and Paul Auster expose what K.W. Jeter terms the darkly perfect world of noir, thus giving rise to and enabling the con men and connected guys of contemporary films noirs such as Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects, David Fincher's Seven, Christopher Nolan's Memento, and Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs.

Also in

Literary Criticism

View All