RARA-AVIS: I'm baaaack

K. Harper (kharper@bgnet.bgsu.edu)
Thu, 10 Sep 1998 10:00:05 -0500 Dear fellow RARA-AVIANs--

As many of you know, I've been champing at the bit to jump back into this
group's discussions. Taking one topic at a time:

1) You'll be happy to hear that after eight months of preparation, I passed
my four-week-long doctoral examinations with flying colors, and am now what
is known in academe as an ABD ("all but dissertation"). My committee knows
of my strong interest in pulp-era popular fiction, and so included three
questions that let me discuss it at length. One was an assignment to
design a graduate seminar on the history of mystery, detective, and crime
fiction, and then defend the genre to a tradition-bound curriculum
committee. The second had to do with ways in which authors of the
1900-1940 period made use of works by earlier writers: I was able to work
in the Brigid-Milady argument that I first tried out here on RARA-AVIS,
which my committee loved. The third was an open-ended question on popular
vs. canonical literature, which I of course used as a platform to argue for
the sanctification of W.R. Burnett.

2) Bill Denton wrote in a message this morning about a book dealer who's
"getting in about a dozen Burnett firsts a week." I have a feeling that
this statement was meant for me, so...yes, Bill, I'd love to hear more,
both on this dealer and the one you wrote me about last week. E-mail me
privately if you think it's not of interest to the list.

3) To understand the meaning of the statement "The postman always rings
twice," you have to complete it: "...but Opportunity only knocks once."
(Ah-HAH, I hear most of you say.) Considering that Cain himself didn't
come up with the title, it's pretty apt.

4) Tom Clancy, hard boiled? Noooooo. Thomas Harris? Sometimes.
Hard-boiled isn't necessarily a question of subject matter: it has to do
with the *tone* in which a story is written. As someone mentioned here a
few weeks back, Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country People," "A Good Man is
Hard to Find," "The Displaced Person," etc. are utterly, bleakly
hard-boiled, but only "Good Man" has anything at all to do with crime.
Ernest Hemingway's "An Alpine Idyll" is another good one. (Uunfortunately,
I can't say much about it here without giving away the ending.) Katherine
Anne Porter's collection _The Old Order_ is made up almost entirely of
hard-boiled/noir stories written from a child's point of view; again, these
have little or nothing to do with crime.

But enough yammering for now: it's time for me to move on to dissertation
work. It's good to be back, RARA-AVIS.

TTFN,

Kathy

Katherine Harper
Department of English
Bowling Green State University
kharper@bgnet.bgsu.edu
Visit the W.R. Burnett Page at http://ernie.bgsu.edu/~kharper/

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