Owning It: Dashiell Hammett, Martha Ivers, and the Poisonous Noir City. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Something More Than Night: Tales of the Noir City
The cinematic city, 1997
The noir city of Hollywood's thrillers of the 1940s and early 1950s is a shadow realm of crime and dislocation in which benighted individuals do battle with implacable threats and temptations. 1 Often a little too conveniently framed as a symptomatic response to the cultural and social upheavals besetting the US after the Second World War-the nuclear age, the Cold War and homefront anticommunism, the adjustment to a postwar economic order-film noir's resonant scenarios of fear, persecution, and disjunction actually began to appear before the US entered the war. Film noir also inherited many of its narrative and stylistic features, and much of its urban atmosphere, from the hard-boiled pulp fiction of the interwar period (Krutnik, 1991 33-44). Looking back from the vantage-point of 1950, Raymond Chandler suggested that the postwar climate was responsible for feeding, not breeding, the 'smell of fear' generated by the pulp crime stories:
Dominant, Dormant and Emergent Tendencies in the Twentieth Century Working-Class Novel
2015
My doctoral dissertation entitled Dominant, Dormant, and Emergent Tendencies in the Twentieth Century Working-Class Novel studies twentieth century working-class novels as a transnational and trans-historic category. I analyze and explore the Marxian revolutionary subject from a subaltern point of view and show that the global political economy constantly reshapes and reconstitutes the working-class. My research traces how the genre has evolved throughout the twentieth century; the dissertation demonstrates how questions of gender, race, ethnicity, (dis)ability, ecojustice and post-colonialism are associated with class politics and its representation in the genre of the twentieth century working-class novel. In order to outline the dominant, dormant and emergent trends within the genre of the working-class novel, I have divided the study into three clusters. First, I study representative Anglophone proletarian novels from the decade of the 1930s to identify the established tenets of the genre. The second cluster focuses on South Asian novels of the 1930s that integrated class politics with colonial crisis. I demonstrate that while the US novels of the Great Depression, the Soviet Socialist novels and the industrial novels of Great Britain are studied as dominant texts of proletarian culture, texts with peripheral status within World Literature, produced by subcontinental writers like Mulk Raj Anand, Premchand and Manik Bandopadhyay extend the boundaries of revolutionary literature by introducing the subaltern's crisis. The third cluster consists of texts by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Mohammed Choukri and Mahasweta Devi. I study these novels as emerging texts of revolutionary resistance and show how class struggle remains a continual theme in the latter half of twentieth century World Literature. iii The dissertation deploys a comparative methodology for studying working-class novels from Asia, Africa, Europe and North America. Revisiting the perception of the 'literary', this research demonstrates that the working-class novel is essentially an international entity. Integrating Marxist theories on literature and representation, with questions of body/disability, Post-colonial criticism and Ecocriticism, I advocate for interdisciplinary and comparative approaches towards the study of working-class novels as an indispensable part of twentieth century World Literature. This research proposes that working-class literature cannot be comprehended thoroughly if we restrict its limits within national literary studies and specific historical periods. Instead, I urge for an alternative methodology that addresses the subject as a transnational category that is constantly evolving. Literary representations of class-conscious political struggles indicate that twentieth century class identity and ideology is embedded within discourses of modernity and modern identity.
Historicizing labor cinema: recovering class and lost work on screen
Workers of all stripes and colors comprise a large and often forgotten segment of cinema history. This essay historicizes several key films and genres associated with early cinema, with an emphasis on pre-Great War French and American cinemas. Simultaneously, this essay formulates several critical responses to labor practices as globally understood and thus anchors this recovery of cinematized working classes, still an ongoing but marginal project in film studies today. Taken together, cinema can refract real-life occupational complexities, class dynamics, and workplace alienation – manifestations that are crucial to, primarily, view class as a social concept and to help us to think through the tensions workers faced under monopoly capitalism. Against this backdrop we must see film's ability to both trivialize class archetypes and capture the complexities as a type of tribute, as the latter becomes a central focus in this essay.
1979
This dissertation examines the background of that movement in terms of its roots in both the nineteenth century theory of the writer in a democracy propounded by Emerson and Whitman and the amalgam of radicalism and Bohemianism that flourished especially in the salons and flats of Greenwich Village im mediately before and after World War I. It also analyzes the more immediate causes of twenties discontent with bourgeois America and of early Depression conditions which drove writ ers to the Left. This study also collates the theoretical criticism about the Proletarian writer and the Proletarian novel that appeared in such Leftist journals as New M asses, Modern Quarterly, and Partisan Review from the late twenties, when it first began to coalesce into a revolutionary sensi bility, until the time of the First American Writers' Congress in April of 1935. The Proletarian literary movement reached a pinnacle at that moment. Soon afterward, forces within the movement in America as well as the shift in Comintern policy from the militant Third Period stance to the more ecumenical position of the Popular Front policy combined to deflect and weaken the drive for the creation of an American Proletarian literature. This study treats four representative Proletarian novels: Michael Gold's Jews Without M o n e y , Jack Conroy's The Disin herited, Robert Cantwell's The Land of Plenty, and James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan. It considers them in terms of the rhetorical use of fiction in the service of a political end-v Co describe aspects of American life as revealing the class struggle and to move readers to revolutionary class-conscious ness. The novels are also examined in light of the prescrip tions of Leftist critical theory, to show the variety of approaches attempted according to different novelists' con ceptions of their literary and political tasks. This study concludes that there is a good deal of variety in the Proletarian novel, both as to literary practice and achievement, contrary to the general critical opinion that the politically-motivated fiction of the thirties is a uniform lump of indistinguishable propagandistic tracts. It also at tempts to place the radical sensibility of the thirties and the Proletarian novel back into the context of the American literary tradition, to argue that it was more broadly human istic in its emphases than pointedly Marxian and thus an in tegral part of that tradition and not the result of foreign influences at work during a time of national instability. vi 2 Reed Clubs were founded to encourage and develop revo lutionary writers. Critical discussion of literature from the Leftist point of view spread to such liberal maga zines as The New Republic and The Nation. New Leftist journals for the promulgation of Marxist literary theory and the publication of new Proletarian writers appeared. Some seventy Proletarian novels were published, and in general, American letters saw a new attention given to the instrumental value of literature. The culmination of the Proletarian literary movement was the First American Writers' Congress, held in New York in April, 1935, under the auspices of the American Communist Party. This meeting attracted not just party members but prominent literary men from across the whole Leftist spec trum. Its widespread publicity and open atmosphere indicate the respectability Marxism had attained by 1935. However, at the same time as Marxism in literature was reaching the moment of its most widespread influence and interest in America, other events, together with the very broadening of the Leftist movement, were combining to effect the reversal of the movement's popular appeal. Faced with the growing threat of Fascism in Spain and Germany in the spring of 1935, the Soviet Communist Party decided to shift emphasis from the promotion of the international proletarian revolution to the formation of a united front against Fascism and imperi alistic war. This Popular Front policy greatly broadened the criteria for judging "acceptable" political positions; made of the literature of the thirties in terms of its avowed ly political aims. This dissertation seeks to at least par tially fill that void. My critical purpose will be primarily descriptive, not interpretive or explanatory. Art was a wea pon in the class struggle, and the Proletarian novel was to promote the Revolution. There were, of course, several means to this general end, and no one believed that reading a Pro letarian novel would cause a worker Immediately to take up arms and revolt. But there did exist on the literary Left a common belief in the service of literature to purposes beyond aesthetic ends. And in this belief the writers and critics in the Leftist literary movement, for a brief period anyway, stood counter to the prevailing opinion of modern literary theory-dating from Pater in England and James in Araericathat literature must be basically aesthetic in nature. 12 stories, poems, cartoons, and political and social satire of an irreverent nature in the spirit of preWar Bohemianism and Socialism. After the demise of The Masses, The Liberator, under the editorship of Eastman and Dell, succeeded as the leading voice of the American Left in literary matters, al though its format included more social and political material than The Masses. In financial trouble in 1922, the editors, who now included Michael Gold, turned the magazine over to the Communist Party, which continued to publish it for sev eral years. However, when the magazine became an official party organ, its previous independent artistic orientation was lost, along with its peculiar vitality, leaving emerging artists of radical persuasion without a forum for the publi cation of their work. Furthermore, as control of The Liberator passed into the hands of political functionaries, the radical literary men who had composed the editorial staff began to drift away. But still desirous of publishing a radical magazine of literary orientation after the model of the original Mass e s , a group of radical artist-intellectuals approached the Garland Fund in 1925 with a proposal for a new non-partisan radical magazine. After some hesitation on the part of the Fund's administrators, who wanted the spon sors of the new magazine to match fifty percent of the Gar land Fund's grant, and after a shuffle of editors, The New Masses was born in early 1926 under the joint editorship of Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman. For the next few years, New Masses attempted a sort of radical cosmopolitanism, V. F. Calverton, "For a New Critical Manifesto," Modern Quarterly. 4 (1927), 7.
1979
This dissertation examines the background of that movement in terms of its roots in both the nineteenth century theory of the writer in a democracy propounded by Emerson and Whitman and the amalgam of radicalism and Bohemianism that flourished especially in the salons and flats of Greenwich Village im mediately before and after World War I. It also analyzes the more immediate causes of twenties discontent with bourgeois America and of early Depression conditions which drove writ ers to the Left. This study also collates the theoretical criticism about the Proletarian writer and the Proletarian novel that appeared in such Leftist journals as New M asses, Modern Quarterly, and Partisan Review from the late twenties, when it first began to coalesce into a revolutionary sensi bility, until the time of the First American Writers' Congress in April of 1935. The Proletarian literary movement reached a pinnacle at that moment. Soon afterward, forces within the movement in America as well as the shift in Comintern policy from the militant Third Period stance to the more ecumenical position of the Popular Front policy combined to deflect and weaken the drive for the creation of an American Proletarian literature. This study treats four representative Proletarian novels: Michael Gold's Jews Without M o n e y , Jack Conroy's The Disin herited, Robert Cantwell's The Land of Plenty, and James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan. It considers them in terms of the rhetorical use of fiction in the service of a political end-v Co describe aspects of American life as revealing the class struggle and to move readers to revolutionary class-conscious ness. The novels are also examined in light of the prescrip tions of Leftist critical theory, to show the variety of approaches attempted according to different novelists' con ceptions of their literary and political tasks. This study concludes that there is a good deal of variety in the Proletarian novel, both as to literary practice and achievement, contrary to the general critical opinion that the politically-motivated fiction of the thirties is a uniform lump of indistinguishable propagandistic tracts. It also at tempts to place the radical sensibility of the thirties and the Proletarian novel back into the context of the American literary tradition, to argue that it was more broadly human istic in its emphases than pointedly Marxian and thus an in tegral part of that tradition and not the result of foreign influences at work during a time of national instability. vi 2 Reed Clubs were founded to encourage and develop revo lutionary writers. Critical discussion of literature from the Leftist point of view spread to such liberal maga zines as The New Republic and The Nation. New Leftist journals for the promulgation of Marxist literary theory and the publication of new Proletarian writers appeared. Some seventy Proletarian novels were published, and in general, American letters saw a new attention given to the instrumental value of literature. The culmination of the Proletarian literary movement was the First American Writers' Congress, held in New York in April, 1935, under the auspices of the American Communist Party. This meeting attracted not just party members but prominent literary men from across the whole Leftist spec trum. Its widespread publicity and open atmosphere indicate the respectability Marxism had attained by 1935. However, at the same time as Marxism in literature was reaching the moment of its most widespread influence and interest in America, other events, together with the very broadening of the Leftist movement, were combining to effect the reversal of the movement's popular appeal. Faced with the growing threat of Fascism in Spain and Germany in the spring of 1935, the Soviet Communist Party decided to shift emphasis from the promotion of the international proletarian revolution to the formation of a united front against Fascism and imperi alistic war. This Popular Front policy greatly broadened the criteria for judging "acceptable" political positions; made of the literature of the thirties in terms of its avowed ly political aims. This dissertation seeks to at least par tially fill that void. My critical purpose will be primarily descriptive, not interpretive or explanatory. Art was a wea pon in the class struggle, and the Proletarian novel was to promote the Revolution. There were, of course, several means to this general end, and no one believed that reading a Pro letarian novel would cause a worker Immediately to take up arms and revolt. But there did exist on the literary Left a common belief in the service of literature to purposes beyond aesthetic ends. And in this belief the writers and critics in the Leftist literary movement, for a brief period anyway, stood counter to the prevailing opinion of modern literary theory-dating from Pater in England and James in Araericathat literature must be basically aesthetic in nature. 12 stories, poems, cartoons, and political and social satire of an irreverent nature in the spirit of preWar Bohemianism and Socialism. After the demise of The Masses, The Liberator, under the editorship of Eastman and Dell, succeeded as the leading voice of the American Left in literary matters, al though its format included more social and political material than The Masses. In financial trouble in 1922, the editors, who now included Michael Gold, turned the magazine over to the Communist Party, which continued to publish it for sev eral years. However, when the magazine became an official party organ, its previous independent artistic orientation was lost, along with its peculiar vitality, leaving emerging artists of radical persuasion without a forum for the publi cation of their work. Furthermore, as control of The Liberator passed into the hands of political functionaries, the radical literary men who had composed the editorial staff began to drift away. But still desirous of publishing a radical magazine of literary orientation after the model of the original Mass e s , a group of radical artist-intellectuals approached the Garland Fund in 1925 with a proposal for a new non-partisan radical magazine. After some hesitation on the part of the Fund's administrators, who wanted the spon sors of the new magazine to match fifty percent of the Gar land Fund's grant, and after a shuffle of editors, The New Masses was born in early 1926 under the joint editorship of Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman. For the next few years, New Masses attempted a sort of radical cosmopolitanism, V. F. Calverton, "For a New Critical Manifesto," Modern Quarterly. 4 (1927), 7.
The Making of American Working-Class Literature
Literature Compass, 2008
This essay traces a line of American literary history that emerges from the lives of workers. Starting with early ballads and songs from indentured servants and enslaved blacks and concluding with contemporary multicultural writing, it documents a process of cultural formation that is embedded in class relationships and struggles. Events in labor history and conditions of unsafe work become the subjects for cultural expression as poems, songs, stories, and novels at the time of the event and as reclaimed cultural/labor antecedents by future generations. The writing shows a reciprocal worker visibility across time and across race, gender, and ethnic differences. The continuous thread is struggle-for physical and material sustainability-and for the right of human expression. Drawing on the chronology of working-class writing from the anthology, American Working-Class Literature (co-edited with Nicholas Coles, Oxford University Press), the author shows how American working-class literature is at once a literary line, a body of work, and a labor line, the work of bodies.