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

ISBN: 0814256724

Author: Orr, Prof. Stanley

Condition: New

Stanley Orrs 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 Chandlers 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 Singers The Usual Suspects, David Finchers Seven, Christopher Nolans Memento, and Quentin Tarantinos Reservoir Dogs.