| Postmodernism perhaps most notably occasions a renewed attention to popular culture. A "low-brow" form such as the detective story, for example, has not only become the focus of contemporary criticism, but has also been parodically recast in the artistic productions of postmodernist writers and film-makers. We have therefore seen in recent times a substantial body of literature and commentary devoted to "anti-detection," to those texts which critique the positivist operations of "classical" or "ratiocinative" detective fiction. What has been largely overlooked, however, is the relationship between postmodernism and the 20th century expression of the detective story which we may conveniently designate as "noir.";Both the hard-boiled detective story and its derivative, the film noir, lie at the very heart of the "discourse of modernity," of what Fredric Jameson has called the "great modernist thematics of alienation, anomie, solitude, and social fragmentation and isolation." It is my contention that many examples of the postmodern "anti-detective" novel and contemporary revisions of film noir evoke, expose, and subvert the strategies by which the noir ethos constructs the human subject and its world.;In the first chapter of the dissertation I examine literary and cinematic texts by canonical noir artists such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Orson Welles: I argue that these figures resort to discourses of misogyny and Orientalism in order to conserve an alienated, and therefore reified, human subjectivity. Ensuing phases of the study treat a series of investigative parodies of noir undertaken by individual writers (Samuel Beckett, Thomas Pynchon, Paul Auster, Philip K. Dick) and cineastes (Ridley Scott, Joel and Ethan Coen, Michelangelo Antonioni, Martin Scorsese). Such "postmodern auteurs" ultimately prove our best critics of noir as they elucidate the hidden, constructive agenda of the hard-boiled vision and of modernism in general. |
