Group-Generated Final Study Guide

Detection & the detective

• a process of arriving at truth
  • by taking the hidden steps
  • eliminating falsehoods through evidence and reasoning
  • avoiding conventional wisdom
• anyone can do it
• requires creative thinking
• considers all possibilities
• observations ⇝ inferences
• assumes that the truth is hidden in the first place
• detection is a model for good literary reading

Causes of Noir

1. War come home
2. Loss repressed, unprocessed
3. Gangster Democracy (lordship/bondage)
4. Legacies of Slavery (racialization of 3)
5. Monopoly Capitalism
6. Psychosis

Expanded meanings of "Noir," outside of its restricted meaning as a sub-genre of detective fiction

• a violent social system
• disconnect between authority and justice
• power is concentrated at the top
• lack of possibilities for upward mobility
• (apparently) chaotic social structure
• the rule of force over law
• a system that rewards being hard-boiled
• inequality, esp. in relation to the widening gap between the rich and the poor
• power hunger
• political corruption
• mental instability
• revelation of the human capacity for evil
• looking out for oneself is a primary virtue
• belief that a man has to be a mogul, a sidekick, or a nobody

Basic ways of responding to a Noir world

• Plan A: Aggression, fighting fire with fire
• Plan B: Breaking the cycle; collective action; informed tactical resistance to the Noir world; reattachment: The Kingdom of Oz and munchkin solidarity
• Plan C: Capitulation; buying in; giving in/up; conceding that the world is and must be a Noir world

Productive responses to the Noir world

1. International justice, not war
2. Therapy, not punishment
3. ?
4. ?
5. ?
6. ?

Noir philosophers

• Niccolò Machiavelli:
  • As "realist" philosopher, especially in The Prince
  • Presentation of power as benevolent, even though the possession of power is not a benevolent goal for the Prince to have.
  • Power itself as the goal.
• Georg Hegel:
  • Lordship and bondage
  • The master-slave dialectic
  • ... as an explanation for why the powerful prevail over the weak.
• Karl Marx:
  • Ideology
  • The construction of complacency; the construction of the sense that the existing order of the world is inevitable and necessary.
• Adam Smith
• Thomas Hobbes

Blondes

• the unachievable object
• multiple types of blondes (Marlowe's speech in The Long Goodbye)
• the blonde as femme fatale
• a distraction from clarity in the process of detection
• Eileen Wade, Evelyn Mulwray, Kim Novak