[Prev][Next][Index][Thread]
Re: RARA-AVIS: Michael Collins/Japanese hardboiled fiction
AHA! So that's what I've written! Noir.
I like and agree with the dichotomy (inside/outside) you've
proposed for noir/hardboiled. The only tricky part is when
the author writes about "mental states/psychology, a sense
of fear, alienation, anxiety, paranoia" in a style that is
"relatively free of affect, clipped, terse, tough." That's what
I tried to do, and I think "noir" describes it best.
Cordially,
Jerry Silverman
a newbie to this list and enjoying it greatly
michael david sharp wrote:
>
> I was just thinking that Woolrich's fiction most accurately represents
> what I consider "noir" in writing, and it is true, his writing is not
> hardboiled (and not simply bec. he doesn't write about detectives). I
> don't think hardboiled and noir are interchangeable, but I think they
> overlap. I would use noir to describe writing that concerns itself with
> mental states/psychology, a sense of fear, alienation, anxiety, paranoia.
> Harboiled refers (in my mind) to tone and attitude, to an idiomatic
> writing that is relatively free of affect, clipped, terse, tough. To be
> terribly oversimplified, noir deals w/ the interior, hardboiled the
> exterior (which is not to say that hardboiled is "superficial" in the
> pejorative sense). Lastly, I want to note that in Pronzini and Adrian's
> *Hard-Boiled*, the editors frequently use "noir" to describe the HB world.
-
# RARA-AVIS: To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis"
# to majordomo@icomm.ca
References:
[Archives] | [RARA-AVIS]