America Is Elsewhere The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture [Paperback]

America is Elsewhereprovides a rigorous and creative reconsideration of hard-boiled crime fiction and the film noir tradition within three related postwar contexts: 1) the rise of the consumer republic in the United States after World War II 2) the challenge to traditional notions of masculinity posed by a new form of citizenship based in consumption, and 3) the simultaneous creation of authenticity effects -- representational strategies designed to safeguard an image of both the American male and America itself outside of and in opposition to the increasingly omnipresent marketplace. Films likeDouble Indemnity,Ace in the Hole, andKiss Me Deadlyalongside novels by Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler provide rich examples for the first half of the study. The second is largely devoted to works less commonly understood in relation to the hard-boiled and noir canon. Examinations of the conspiracy films from the Seventies and Eighties -- likeKluteandThe Parallax View-- novels by Thomas Pynchon, Chester Himes and William Gibson reveal the persistence and evolution of these authenticity effects across the second half of the American twentieth century.

Acknowledgments

Introduction
i. Authenticity Effects
ii. Out of the Past, Into the Supermarket

Part I: Postwar Spaces, Postwar Men
Ch 1. Last Chance Texaco: Gas Station Noir
Ch 2. The Publishing Class: Detectives and Executives in Noir Fiction

Part II: Maps of Conspiracy
Ch 3. The Gumshoe Vanishes: Conspiracy Film in the Sixties Era
Ch 4. Flirters, Deserters, Wimps and Pimps: Pynchon's Two Americas
Ch 5. Black Ops: Ghetto Space and Counterconspiracy

Part III: Postmodernism and Authenticity
Ch 6. Postmodern Authenticity, or, Cyberpunk
Ch 7. The Space of the Clock: The Corporation as Genre in The Hudsucker Proxy
Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography

In this lucidly written study, Erik Dussere delCZ