America Is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture
America is Elsewhere provides a rigorous and creative reconsideration of hard-boiled crime fiction and the film noir tradition within three related postwar contexts: 1) the rise of the consumer republic in the United States after World War II 2) the challenge to traditional notions of masculinity posed by a new form of citizenship based in consumption, and 3) the simultaneous creation of "authenticity effects" — representational strategies designed to safeguard an image of both the American male and America itself outside of and in opposition to the increasingly omnipresent marketplace. Films like Double Indemnity, Ace in the Hole, and Kiss Me Deadly alongside novels by Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler provide rich examples for the first half of the study. The second is largely devoted to works less commonly understood in relation to the hard-boiled and noir canon. Examinations of the conspiracy films from the Seventies and Eighties — like Klute and The Parallax View — novels by Thomas Pynchon, Chester Himes and William Gibson reveal the persistence and evolution of these authenticity effects across the second half of the American twentieth century.
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America Is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture
America is Elsewhere provides a rigorous and creative reconsideration of hard-boiled crime fiction and the film noir tradition within three related postwar contexts: 1) the rise of the consumer republic in the United States after World War II 2) the challenge to traditional notions of masculinity posed by a new form of citizenship based in consumption, and 3) the simultaneous creation of "authenticity effects" — representational strategies designed to safeguard an image of both the American male and America itself outside of and in opposition to the increasingly omnipresent marketplace. Films like Double Indemnity, Ace in the Hole, and Kiss Me Deadly alongside novels by Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler provide rich examples for the first half of the study. The second is largely devoted to works less commonly understood in relation to the hard-boiled and noir canon. Examinations of the conspiracy films from the Seventies and Eighties — like Klute and The Parallax View — novels by Thomas Pynchon, Chester Himes and William Gibson reveal the persistence and evolution of these authenticity effects across the second half of the American twentieth century.
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America Is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture

America Is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture

by Erik Dussere
America Is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture

America Is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture

by Erik Dussere

Paperback

$42.99 
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Overview

America is Elsewhere provides a rigorous and creative reconsideration of hard-boiled crime fiction and the film noir tradition within three related postwar contexts: 1) the rise of the consumer republic in the United States after World War II 2) the challenge to traditional notions of masculinity posed by a new form of citizenship based in consumption, and 3) the simultaneous creation of "authenticity effects" — representational strategies designed to safeguard an image of both the American male and America itself outside of and in opposition to the increasingly omnipresent marketplace. Films like Double Indemnity, Ace in the Hole, and Kiss Me Deadly alongside novels by Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler provide rich examples for the first half of the study. The second is largely devoted to works less commonly understood in relation to the hard-boiled and noir canon. Examinations of the conspiracy films from the Seventies and Eighties — like Klute and The Parallax View — novels by Thomas Pynchon, Chester Himes and William Gibson reveal the persistence and evolution of these authenticity effects across the second half of the American twentieth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780199969920
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publication date: 11/01/2013
Pages: 320
Product dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Erik Dussere is Associate Professor of Literature at American University. He is the author of Balancing the Books: Faulkner, Morrison, and the Economies of Slavery.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction i. Authenticity Effects ii. Out of the Past, Into the Supermarket

Part I: Postwar Spaces, Postwar Men
Ch 1. Last Chance Texaco: Gas Station Noir
Ch 2. The Publishing Class: Detectives and Executives in Noir Fiction

Part II: Maps of Conspiracy
Ch 3. The Gumshoe Vanishes: Conspiracy Film in the Sixties Era
Ch 4. Flirters, Deserters, Wimps and Pimps: Pynchon's Two Americas
Ch 5. Black Ops: Ghetto Space and Counterconspiracy

Part III: Postmodernism and Authenticity
Ch 6. Postmodern Authenticity, or, Cyberpunk
Ch 7. The Space of the Clock: The Corporation as Genre in The Hudsucker Proxy
Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
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