561-02
Nightmare Alleys--American Noir Classics
Mike Wentworth
M 6:30-9:15
MO 102
"The only significant fiction in America is popular fiction."
-- Kenneth
Rexroth
Robert Edmond Alter, Swamp Sister; Steve Fisher, I Wake Up
Screaming;
David
Goodis, Shoot the Piano Player; Patricia Highsmith, The
Talented Mr.
Ripley;
Horace McCoy, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye; They Shoot Horses,
Don=92t They?;
Mickey Spillane, Kiss Me Deadly; Jim Thompson, A Hell of a
Woman; The
Killer
Inside Me; Population 1280; Charles Willeford, Pick-Up; The
Woman
Chaser;
Charles Williams, The Hot Spot; Cornell Woolrich, I Married a
Dead Man;
Rear
Window and Other Stories. Focusing upon matters of style and
narrative
craft, genre
conventions, gender, socio-cultural influences, and marketing
and
publishing trends,
the course (with the exception of British crime novelist
Patricia
Highsmith=92s The
Talented Mr. Ripley) will provide an investigation of the
American
"roman noir" (literally
"black novel") and will feature such masters of the genre as
Horace
McCoy,
Cornell Woolrich, David Goodis, and, perhaps most notably,
Jim Thompson.
Despair, pessimism, psycho-pathological obsession,
perversion,
corruption,
schizophrenia, and paranoia (on a good day!) insufficiently
describe the
Sophoclean fatalism, the abject bleakness, the unrelieved
toothache in
the yawning
abyss of the night that inevitably evolves as the "order of
the day or,
more
aptly, night" in each of the featured texts. Whatever the
scenario, you
can
be sure that just when things can=92t imaginably get any
worse, they get =
a
whole
lot worse, to such an extent that the terror and horror of it
all
elides, almost
imperceptibly, into laughter, even though the joke=92s on
you. So if
you=92re looking
for a few good "laughs," check this one out when it plays at
a theater
near you.
Achievement criteria: two shorter essays (7 pp. apiece) or
one longer
essay
(12-15 pp.) and a comprehensive final.
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