David,
Re your comment below:
"Incidentally, I've always thought that Chandler (no offense
to your doctoral thesis--I'm sure it's stellar) was always
kind of a poor example of the potential literariness of the
genre. I used to adore Chandler myself, until I made the
mistake of taking a graduate seminar exclusively about him.
When I really looked at him that closely, I discovered, much
to my teacher's dismay, how much I truly loathed him, how
tedious he now seemed to me (it'd been almost a decade since
I'd read anything of his)."
Though it apparently killed your love of Chandler, your
reference to a University course devoted exclusively to him
affords me an opportunity to announce that I've been hired to
teach an on-line course on Chandler that will become
available in March
(or maybe April).
The course, entitled RAYMOND CHANDLER - MASTER OF AMERICAN
NOIR, will be taught at Barnes & Nobel's
"University" site and will use the first volume of the
Library of America's collection of Chandler works, STORIES
& EARLY NOVELS, as its text. We'll read seven short
stories, and the first three novels (not, unfortunately your
favorite, TLITL, which is in the second volume).
I had to write a series of 8 lectures, amounting to 40,000 to
50,000 words, which if bound, would be a book. A small book,
but a book. So, in a way, I have two books coming out at the
same time. Huzzah!
The course'll probably be a bit elementary for most of you
Rare Birds, but some of you might enjoy it. If the course is
successful, it'll be offered every other month. Maybe I'll
see a few of you there.
Of course, the down side of this for some of you is that,
since I'm now a paid professional EXPERT on what is and isn't
noir, I'll be more insufferable than ever.
By the way, I should mention that I have another Rare Bird to
thank for this opportunity. I'm not sure he'd want his name
mentioned (that whole "insufferable" thing), but he knows who
he is, and, I hope he knows how grateful I am. He was
B&N's first choice to put the course together and teach
it. He was too busy with other projects to take the job on,
so he recommended me. If I get his permission, I'll thank him
less mysteriously.
JIM DOHERTY
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo!
SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it! http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/
-- # Plain ASCII text only, please. Anything else won't show up. # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 03 Feb 2004 EST