The SECRET is in the SECRETS Ephron, Hallie
The Writer (Boston),
07/2012, Letnik:
125, Številka:
7
Magazine Article
Suppose, then, that Thursby secretly had been: * A drug trafficker * A financier who embezzled client funds * A scientist about to debunk a fad diet * A performer at a male strip club who was being ...stalked by an older woman * A man who was recently contacted by a brother he never knew he had * A reporter working undercover to investigate political corruption * A researcher working in a lab where the release of a toxic substance has been covered up * A serial rapist * A witness to a murder * A philanderer having an affair with his business partner's wife * A woman Any one of these would make a perfectly good victim's secret. ...it becomes a more internal journey: figuring out what to do about a woman he has fallen in love with who turns out to be a murderer.
This fall, Dashiell Hammett -- the Maryland-born author of such crime-fiction classics as "The Maltese Falcon," "The Glass Key" and "The Thin Man," who died in 1961 -- will have all his five novels ...collected in one definitive volume, annotated by the scholar Steven Marcus for the Library of America. The writer whose leftist politics caused his books to be yanked from the shelves of U.S. libraries abroad in 1953 by State Department decree will thus enter the closest thing this country has to an official literary canon. The honor is undeniably deserved, says Library of America publisher Max Rudin. "Hammett invented the modern American crime novel," Mr. Rudin states. "Thanks to Prohibition, crime and corruption and violence became facts of life in American cities in the '20s; and Hammett was the first to find a style to address that in literature. He figured out that the detective novel could be used to tackle those subjects, and he found a tough lean prose that was able to convey that new kind of gritty urban reality. That was an enormous contribution to American writing." As documented in Joan Mellen's 1996 dual biography, "Hellman and Hammett," the playwright Lillian Hellman, Hammett's longtime companion, swiftly acquired the rights to all of Hammett's books and many stories after his death, essentially denying his two daughters control of, or much income from, his work. Upon Hellman's death in 1984, her title to his works was bequeathed in trust to her own trio of literary executors. Hammett's surviving daughter eventually hired a lawyer and in the mid-'90s secured copyright to her father's novels. But control of Hammett's shorter works remained with the Hellman-appointed trustees: William Abrahams, Peter Feibleman and Richard Poirier.
When it first appeared in 1961, Jean-Luc Godard's Une Femme Est une Femme (A Woman is a Woman) generally pleased audiences and critics; it won the Jury's Special Prize at the Berlin Film Festival, ...where Anna Karina took the Best Actress Award for her lead role as Angéla. The boy's expression of disapproval may indicate his belief that he has outgrown such children's books, yet it also reflects Godard's general disdain for the saccharine sentimentalism of Walt Disney - Walt Dismal, Godard called him (Godard on Godard 126) - whose adaptation of the fairy tale, Sleeping Beauty (1959), had appeared not long before.
This study examines one of the significant phenomena in the histories of American cultures: the Black Mask magazine. The methodology I use combines historical, cultural, social and literary ...approaches. I examine the connections between the development of American detective fiction as a genre and such social and cultural phenomena as mass journalism, crime reporting, the institutionalization of the detective and especially the factors which affected the inexpensive publications industry. In examining Black Mask fiction, I focus on the interaction between editors, writers and readers which shaped hard-boiled, action-oriented fiction into recognizable form. Chapter One looks at Poe's invention of his Dupin stories in the context of the penny press of the 1830s and the story papers and the city mysteries of the 1840s and at the creation of the dime novels, and dime and nickel libraries in the 1860s and 1870s. Chapter Two examines the dime detective phenomenon between the 1870s and 1890s, the demise of the story papers, dime novels, and dime and nickel libraries, the rise of the pulp magazines at the turn of the century, and the emergence of The Black Mask in 1920. Chapter Three argues that in creating Race Williams, a hard-boiled, vigilante hero, Carroll John Daly invented a narrative space and a hero that became the most significant paradigm for Black Mask fiction and its heroes. Chapter Four examines how Dashiell Hammett, reacting to changes in the market, reinvented the image of the private eye in the character of the Continental Op (and himself), converting him from an almost Holmesian character to the hard-boiled type of hero. Chapter Five focuses on the legendary period under Joseph Shaw's editorship between 1926 and 1936. It argues that, in response to the demands of the marketplace, Shaw streamlined the magazine's generic orientation so as continually to promote the action-oriented type of fiction that his predecessors had been developing.
In recent years, Latin-American novelists have increasingly focused on the theme of the discovery of America; through parody and irony, they are rewriting and reinventing history. This dissertation ...examines four novels concerning the arrival of the Spaniards that highlight the relationship between history and fiction. They are: El arpa y la sombra by Alejo Carpentier, Los perros del paraiso by Abel Posse, El entenado by Juan Jose Saer, and Maluco: La novela de los descubridores by Napoleon Baccino Ponce de Leon. The purpose of this study is to show that the above authors rewrite, reinterpret and reinvent history by incorporating events and views taken from historiography and chronicles, and by simultaneously questioning the authority and reliability of these sources of knowledge about the past. The novels portray the historical record as a narrative construct which does not differ from fiction and whose accessibility is conditioned by textuality. Since philosophers of history like Hayden White and Michel de Certeau recognize the literary elements present in all historical writing, their ideas are supportive of this argument. History becomes fiction, and the novels become rewritings of an already fictive discourse. This study analyzes the narrative strategies by which the transformation of history into fiction is achieved. The dissertation also focuses on the novels as historiographic metafiction, a concept proposed by Linda Hutcheon to describe the incorporation of different genres, self-questioning narrators, self-reflexive texts, and a de-centered perspective. Since these novels mistrust the authority of the historical record, they also eliminate representations of authority, and question the mythification of heroic figures. They give a voice to marginal, peripheral, and self-critical characters, notably orphans. The mythified heroes of historiography and previous literature are also replaced by picaresque protagonists, who assume different roles for their convenience. The novels depict history as fiction, the characters as actors, and events as spectacles, theatrical performances, or carnivals. Concepts of Mikhail Bakhtin support the analysis of these motifs. Ultimately, official history is viewed as a fictitious text that can be subverted through carnivalesque inversions, intertextual rewriting, and invention.
Detective fiction has enjoyed a surge in both production and popularity in Spain in the last twenty-five years. The reasons for the "boom" and what the significance of it may be is the focus of this ...dissertation. The novels of six principal contributors to this genre are studied: Julian Ibanez Garcia, Juan Madrid, Jorge Martinez Reverte, Andreu Martin, Eduardo Mendoza and Manuel Vazquez Montalban. In order to gain a fuller picture of the manner in which the genre has evolved in Spain, several minor figures are also considered. This thesis is twofold: first, that contemporary Spanish detective fiction is directly related to changing socio-political conditions in Spain which began in the 1960's; and second, that these generic, formulaic detective novels also represent an aesthetic protest to those twentieth-century Spanish novels which were highly experimental in both form and content. Like other popular works in a contemporary and largely literate society, the Spanish detective novel can be seen as an indicator of that society's ideological norms and implicit world views. The dissertation views the Spanish detective novel as an ideological form which reflects radical changes in the social and political milieu in the 1960's and 1970's. In general, the Spanish detective novel exhibits an ideology favorable to the process of democratization while, at the same time, it focuses on negative social and economic aspects of the new democracy. The study attempts to show the manner in which the confluence of certain elements of the form and content of these novels brings this ideology into focus. During the authoritarian regime preceding the genre's appearance in Spain the will or choice of the individual was irrelevant. Consequently, the detective novel, which foregrounds the private morality of the individual, represents a particularly timely expression of these ideals in Spain.
I intend in this dissertation to examine how, like their British forebears, American writers perceived and expressed the fragility of their post-war world through the espionage novel. Chapters One ...and Two examine the debts American writers owe to their British predecessors, ascertaining not only what aspects of the genre crossed the ocean intact but which aspects American writers chose to adapt to their own particular needs. Chapter Three investigates what in the American experience dictated the particular forms, themes, techniques and types of emphases discussed in Chapters One and Two rather than others. Chapter Three also addresses questions of purpose and effect: it tries to determine whether American espionage novels are designed merely to entertain, to help one escape, or to achieve specific political and/or propagandistic purposes. Chapter Four raises questions of literary merit. It also addresses the more fundamental question of whether a critic has a right to expect more of a formulaic writer than just a skillful and controlled use of the formulaic tools. When all these questions have been asked and answered, a balanced picture of the American espionage novel should emerge which demonstrates that, although the American espionage novel is, on the whole, conventional and derivative, the emphases found in these novels are characteristically American, deriving from the American consciousness and experience. And, every now and then, an American writer produces a book--or parts of one--which, while staying within the confines of the genre's formulae, is uniquely creative and engaging.
