Popular Fiction

1. Dashiell Hammett and
Noir/Hard-Boiled
Detective Fiction
Jesús Ángel González

2. Why study popular fiction?
• What’s popular fiction?
• Elite Art
• Folk Art
• Popular Art
• Why study it?
• As a means to something else
• As something worth studying in itself
• Umberto Eco: Apocalittici e Integrati (1964)

3. Different ways of looking at popular fiction
• Roman Jakobson’s Paradigm of Communication

4. The Author
• Feelings, intuition rather than reason?
• “What I write comes from the gut, instead of my head, from intuition rather
than intellect” (Stephen King)
• Collective authorship: “the genius of the system” (André Bazin)

5. The Reader
• Reader Response Theory: what gives the reader pleasure?
• Implicit Reader
• Psychoanalysis (Lacan, Metz): connections with the reader’s unconscious
• Popular fiction as problem-solving strategies (happy endings)
• Popular fiction as Myths, archetypes that reflect the collective unconscious (Carl
Jung, Lévi-Strauss)
• Leslie Fiedler: “watering of emotions” (rather than catharsis)
• Stephen King: “unreal symbols of very real fears”

6. The (Social) Context
• Apocalittici: popular fiction “gets in the way of genuine feeling and responsible thinking by
creating cheap mechanical responses” (Leavis); Cultural industry “solves conflicts for
readers only in appearance, in a way that can hardly be solved in their real lives” (Adorno): .
Mechanism to control the masses.
• Detective novel: Reactionary or Progressive?
• Thomas Schatz: Hollywood genre films are able “to ‘play it both ways’, to criticize and
reinforce the values, beliefs, and ideals of our culture within the same narrative context”
• Mimesis or escapism?: “literature or expression and literature of escape” (Chandler)
• Hammett: “took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley”

7. The Text
• In general, not the most useful approach
• Hammet’s case:
“Hammett's fiction was successful on two levels. On the casual reading typically expected
for popular fiction, the novels are absorbing and powerful; on a closer, more careful
reading of the sort generally reserved for literature, the novels offer a richness of language
that is expected of true art.” (Gregory 15)

8. The (Generic) Codes (1)
• Genres and Formulas: Structuralist and narratological approaches
• Stephen Neale: Genres as “systems of orientations, expectations and conventions that
circulate between industry, text, and subject”
• Todorov: Theoretical genres and historical genres
• Genre System as a means to operate as “sites of meaning and pleasure” (Krutnik)
• Cawelti: Formulas as “ways in which specific cultural themes and stereotypes become
embodied in more universal story archetypes”. Moral fantasies underlying each archetype:
Adventure (victory over death), Mystery (rational solution to all problems) and Romance
(love triumphant). Also, Melodrama (goodness of the social order), and “alien beings or
states” (conquering the unknown world)
• Thomas Schatz: Genres of order vs. genres of integration. Solving a conflict that is used to
examine the contradictions of American society
• R. Warshow: Combination of originality and repetition

9. The (Generic) Codes (2)
HARD-BOILED DETECTIVE NOVEL/FILM OR NOIR?
• Cawelti: Mystery Archetype, 2 formulas: classical and hard-boiled detective
stories
• Cynthia Hamilton: hard-boiled novel as a subgenre of “American adventure”
(like Westerns)
• Black Mask: “action-detection stories”, “realistic mystery fiction” (Chandler)
• France: Roman Noir and Film Noir. Applied also in the UK
• Thriller
• Hard-boiled?

10. The (Generic) Codes (3)
GENRE: CRIME FICTION. Criteria to classify: thematic, structural and crime
triangle (criminal, victim, investigator)
1. CLASSICAL DETECTIVE FICTION: conservative, retrospective, emphasis on
the investigator (Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie)
2. ROMAN NOIR: Critical (“malaise specifique”), violent
1. DETECTIVE ROMAN NOIR: prospective/retrospective, emphasis on the investigator:
The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep
2. NON-DETECTIVE ROMAN NOIR: prospective (no past mystery), emphasis on the
criminal (James M. Cain, penitentiary stories) or the victim (David Goodis, Cornell
Woolrich)
3. THRILLERS: Prospective, no specific unease, emphasis on action and adventure:
James Bond

11. The Medium (of contact)
• Medium (audiovisual)/Channel (TV, Films)
• More in FILM/LITERATURE