William Denton (buff@pobox.com)
Tue, 30 Nov 1999 17:44:36 -0500 (EST)
I was asked to forward this to the list.
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Paradoxa: Call for Papers
"Noir"
Deadline for Submissions: April 1, 2000
Paradoxa is seeking submissions for a special issue on
"noir": its origins, its so-called classic period, its more
contemporary forms, as well as the dead-ends and blind alleys
that have gone to ground along the way. The past decade has
seen an explosion of noir sensibility in all manner of
popular media. Readers and critics of roman and film noir are
invited to address any and all aspects of the form (or genre,
or style). Everything about noir appears debatable, from the
time and place of its birth, to the legitimacy of its
continued existence. What is noir? Definitional essays will
be helpful in grappling with our topic. What is the
relationship between, for instance, the "dark city mysteries"
of the 19th century and the hardboiled detective novels of
Hammett and Chandler that helped codify noir? How did the
French interpretation of American crime films of the 1940s
forever impact our understanding of noir? Other topics of
interest might include:
Noir and Race: Novelists Chester Himes and Walter Mosely have
chosen the noir genre. How have they been formed by it, and
how have they transformed it? It has been said that Iceberg
Slim and Donald Goines have influenced Gangsta Rap. What is
the relationship between noir and culture? Noir and
(inter)Textuality: Is noir all context, all atmosphere and
ambiance and attitude? Or is there a "there" there, an
underlying site, a Jungian archetype, an Ur text, a locus of
references where the writer's and reader's needs meet? Who is
the ideal noir writer's reader? Noir and
Sexuality: Readers have found both fear and hatred of women
and gays, and revulsion for the sexual impulse itself, in
much classic noir. Are the obvious answers insufficient? Too
transparent? Is there an implicit challenge that noir authors
extend in the form of their apparent misogyny or homophobia?
How have women and gay writers used and subverted noir?
Neo-Noir Auteurs: Why have Quentin Tarrantino, the Coen
brothers, John Dahl, and others expressed such interest in
noir? How have the neo-noir filmmakers subverted and expanded
its possibilities? How can we understand the pop side of
contemporary noir? Where is the intersection between
Avant-Pop and noir?
Noir and SF: From K.W. Jeter's Dr. Adder to William Gibson's
Neuromancer to Michael Marshall Smith's Spares, we see
cyberpunks borrowing from the rich veins of the Black Mask
writers. How and why do neo-noir writers use traditional noir
devices to reenergize their own endeavors.
Noir on the Left/Noir on the Right: From Dashiell Hammett to
Jim Thompson to Ross Macdonald, noir has been a place where
writers with leftist sympathies have forged paranoid
fantasies in which the consumerist impulse is made manifest
in a killing frenzy. At the same time, Mickey Spillane and
James Ellroy have created fantasies of conspiracy and
xenophobic menace. How have shifts in political culture
effected noir over the years? or, how is the political and
cultural landscape reflected in noir?
Noir and the City: From George Lippard's The Quaker City, the
urban jungle has been portrayed as an unknowable cesspool of
corruption, paranoia and disease. Why is so much noir set in
the city? Can noir exist in a rural landscape? How does
critic Mike Davis (City of Quartz) read a noir narrative on
the face of Los Angeles? Where do we locate Daniel Woodrell's
noir Ozark fiction along this spatial noir continuum?
Noir and the American Tradition: In his National Book
Award-winning bio of Jim Thompson, Robert Polito sees
Thompson's Savage Night as having roots in Charles Brockden
Brown's Weiland. Is noir an American form, born out of a
unique culture circumstance? Which may beg the additional
question of the place of noir in the American canon: How
significant is the publication of the Library of America's
Crime Novels, and what does the LOA's choice of titles reveal
about our assumptions regarding noir?
While we certainly will be entertaining work on Dashiell
Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Horace
McCoy and Charles Willeford, we are just as interested in the
web of intersecting paths that have been followed, forgotten,
detoured around and rediscovered in the last 50 years. Are
there any "lost treasures" that need to be reclaimed, writers
who toiled in this often disposable form but were discarded
too quickly? We are also interested in seeing critiques of
current noir practitioners such as James Ellroy, Jerome
Charyn, Richard Stark, Sara Paretsky, George Pelecanos,
Daniel Woodrell, Dennis Lehane, Craig Holden, Joe Lansdale,
Eddie Bunker, James Sallis, Vicki Hendricks, Boston Teran,
Susanna Moore, Andrew Vachss, Robert Skinner, etc. Paradoxa
invites queries regarding other possibilities.
Guest-Editor for the issue is novelist Jack O'Connell (Box
Nine, Wireless, The Skin Palace, Word Made Flesh), College of
the Holy Cross
(joconnel@holycross.edu).
Deadline for submissions is April 1, 2000. Please consult
submission guidelines on the inside back cover of the
journal, or follow MLA guidelines in terms of general format,
citation reference, footnotes, headings, etc. Send 3 copies,
each with an abstract of not more than 300 words on a
separate page, to Managing Editor David Willingham c/o
Paradoxa PO Box 2237, Vashon Island WA 98070 (USA). For more
information regarding this project, or past or future
projects, or subscriptions to the journal, send queries to
(Info@Paradoxa.com) or
see the Paradoxa website at:
www.accessone.com/~paradoxa
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