Description
Book SynopsisAmerica is Elsewhere provides a rigorous and creative reconsideration of hard-boiled crime fiction and the film noir tradition.
Trade ReviewDussere offers new and richly insightful ways of understanding both noir texts themselves and the discourses of authenticity in which they participate and that they have helped constitute. * Christine Photinos, Journal of American Culture *
In this lucidly written study, Erik Dussere deftly combines a wide-ranging examination of social and political forces with the detailed textual scrutiny of a range of films and novels to produce an original and illuminating discussion of film noir as an oppositional critique of consumer culture. America Is Elsewhere not only extends our understanding of film noir, but offers a penetrating analysis of post-war American culture. * Andrew Spicer, coeditor of A Companion to Film Noir *
America Is Elsewhere provides a rigorous consideration of key texts in hard-boiled and film noir traditions. While other studies have considered these texts in relation to consumption and masculinity, Dussere strikes important new ground by including the crucial and contested postwar concept of authenticity in his examination. The result is a nuanced and creative addition to our study of these works and the period as a whole. * Abigail Cheever, author of Real Phonies: Cultures of Authenticity in Post-World War II America *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ; 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
