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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