RARA-AVIS: greetings and suggested books

ziggy nix (ziggy@wilmington.net)
Thu, 26 Mar 1998 00:40:06 -0500 evening, i'm ziggy nix and new to the list. i probably will
not be reading everything with ya'll cause i'm in english
grad school and really do not have the time until the summer.
i'm taking a course in hardboiled fiction next semester and i
thought you kiddos would be interested in seeing what we're
reading. on the idea of books to read, i highly suggest Horce
McKoy's "They Shoot Horses Don't They", it's a great book
and one of my favorites. well i look forward to the messages...
ciao,
ziggy nix

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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