ENGL 440 A: Special Studies In Literature

Cherniavsky

English 440

Fall 2016

Topic: Hardboiled, Noir and the Politics of Style 

This course will address two cross-pollinated products of  literary and visual culture – the hardboiled detective novel and film noir – that have proven both remarkably durable, persisting from the early 1930s to the present moment, and remarkably hard to specify.   Rather than comprise a genre, hardboiled and noir seem rather, and more elusively, to describe a look, an attitude, a feel – a visual and narrative style – that traverses any number of established genres, including ‘true crime’ fiction, police procedurals, melodramas, and thrillers. The hardboiled/noir ‘style’ appears mobile and plastic in other ways, as well, spanning, as it does, the divide between elite modernisms and mass culture, and a political spectrum marked at the one end by something like the Red Scare thematics of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer and at the other by what Mike Davis describes as the quasi-Marxist sensibilities of Hollywood noir directors such as Billy Wilder and Orson Welles.  

This class will explore the complex articulations of narrative style and cultural politics in hardboiled and noir.   If ‘style’ is inevitably a market phenomenon (a way of branding and selling cultural products), when and for whom might it function critically?  To what extent does the dissemination of a style create possibilities for appropriating and repurposing it – for example, possibilities for women writers to repurpose the expressly misogynist conventions of classic hardboiled fiction?  Conversely, to what extent is there a politics intrinsic to the style – an orientation to sexual and racial difference, for instance -- that is ‘written in’ to the touchstone figures, settings, and organizing motifs of these narrative modes?

Course materials will include both fiction and film, spanning the 1930s to the present. I am still tinkering with the syllabus, but readings in print fiction might include  Dashiell Hammett, The Continental Op,  Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, Dorothy Hughes, In a Lonely Place, Chester Himes, A Rage in Harlem,  and Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress, while our film viewing might include Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944), The Hitchhiker (Ida Lupino, 1953), Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1959), Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) and Fargo  (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1996).   We will also take up  a selection of critical materials on modernism and popular culture (Andreas Huyssen, Walter Benjamin) , the material contexts of hardboiledand noir (Mike Davis, Michael Denning, James Naremore),  and its cultural politics (Sylvia Harvey, Janey Place, Elizabeth Cowie, Stephen Heath, Manthia Diawara).  Course expectations include regular and engaged participation, a group presentation, a paper proposal with annotated bibliography, and a final research paper.