David Goodis’s Noir Fiction: The American Dream’s Paralysis

In its depiction of marginalized characters trapped within inner-city slums, David Goodis’s postwar fiction of the late 1940s through the 1950s constitutes a noir critique of the American Dream’s paralysis. The defining elements of that paradigm—romantic fulfillment, family cohesion, upward mobility, suburban escape, egalitarian success, material prosperity—are systematically shown to be beyond attainment by the underprivileged and, thus, a mechanism of social victimization. At the same time, despite his oeuvre’s unremitting bleakness, Goodis valorizes his protagonists’ capacity for endurance amid their alienation and disenfranchisement. During the fraught era of Cold War anxiety masked by mainstream conformism, this author’s down-and-outers recognize the truth that “There’s no success like failure, / And … failure’s no success at all.” His pulp novels significantly extend late-modernist themes of fragmentation, entropy, and despair

Ghostwriting and Spectrality in Robert Harris’s The Ghost

A critique of Tony Blair’s collaboration with George W. Bush in the War on Terror, Robert Harris’s The Ghost (2007) goes beyond its topical subject by exploring the connections between ghostwriting and spectrality. The unnamed protagonist of Harris’s novel is a professional ghostwriter who, after being commissioned to revamp former Prime Minister Adam Lang’s memoirs, becomes enmeshed in various forms of spectrality. While isolated with his hosts in a fortress-like compound on Martha’s Vineyard during the island’s bleak off-season, the ghostwriter experiences the Uncanny firsthand. In the end he compiles a 160,000-word book, not realizing that with the project’s completion he is signing his own death warrant by writing a work about the pursuit of truth. The novel’s coda differs from that of Roman Polanski’s 2010 film adaptation, but Harris’s narrative captures the universality of literary Gothicism

Cultural Relativism and “Our Way of Life”: Patricia Highsmith’s The Tremor of Forgery

Like Meursault in The Stranger (1942) by Albert Camus, the 34-year-old protagonist of Patricia Highsmith’s The Tremor of Forgery (1969) is almost certain of having killed an Arab in self-defence but feels no remorse for the deed except as it is judged by other Americans within his orbit of Western influence. While visiting Tunisia on what is apparently his first trip overseas, novelist Howard Ingham wrestles with the alterity of an Arab culture during the Six-Day War in the Middle East while at the same time criticizing the parochialism of a countryman who broadcasts propaganda about “Our Way of Life.” Ingham soon embraces, albeit equivocally, a perspective of cultural relativism, but his doing so is largely the dodge of a doubly dispossessed stranger in a strange land. Tremor thus figures as one of Highsmith’s “texts of exile,” as Fiona Peters has called it, that ends with Ingham’s anticlimactic return home to renew a relationship with his former wife

[Review] Cian Duffy (2014) My purpose was humbler, but also higher: Thomas De Quincey’s 'System of the heavens’, popular science and the sublime

Review of article: Duffy Cian, Romanticism, Volume 20 Issue 1, Page 1-14, ISSN 1354-991x Available Online Mar 201

Vestiges of the Phoenix: De Quincey, Kant and the Heavens

© Edinburgh University Press, 2011publication-status: Accepte

Social Movements and International Relations: A Relational Framework

Social movements are increasingly recognized as significant features of contemporary world politics, yet to date their treatment in international relations theory has tended to obfuscate the considerable diversity of these social formations, and the variegated interactions they may establish with state actors and different structures of world order. Highlighting the difficulties conventional liberal and critical approaches have in transcending conceptions of movements as moral entities, the article draws from two under-exploited literatures in the study of social movements in international relations, the English School and Social Systems Theory, to specify a wider range of analytical interactions between different categories of social movements and of world political structures. Moreover, by casting social movement phenomena as communications, the article opens international relations to consideration of the increasingly diverse trajectories and second-order effects produced by social movements as they interact with states, intergovernmental institutions, and transnational actors

Murder and Aesthetics in Patricia Highsmith’s Deep Water

Patricia Highsmith’s fifth novel, Deep Water (1957), revolves around three murders committed by 36-year-old Victor Van Allen, head of Greenspur Press in Little Wesley, Massachusetts, and a genuine aesthete whose interests include handset colophons, snails, bee culture, carpentry, music, painting, stargazing, and gardening. An esteemed non-conformist in an upscale New England community, Van Allen is initially tolerant of his wife’s serial infidelities but reaches a breaking point when he kills two of her lovers before strangling his spouse. Highsmith’s mordantly unsettling narrative anticipates the mimetic fascination with murder in postmodern popular culture that ever since Thomas De Quincey’s 1827 satirical essay on the subject has abounded in fiction, nonfiction, and film. Writing against the grain of post-World War II conformism, Highsmith proleptically addresses issues of maladaptation in her portrait of a repressed sociopath who attempts to mask his inner rage via the sublimation of aesthetic pursuits

Murder and Aesthetics in Patricia Highsmith’s Deep Water

Patricia Highsmith’s fifth novel, Deep Water (1957), revolves around three murders committed by 36-year-old Victor Van Allen, head of Greenspur Press in Little Wesley, Massachusetts, and a genuine aesthete whose interests include handset colophons, snails, bee culture, carpentry, music, painting, stargazing, and gardening. An esteemed non-conformist in an upscale New England community, Van Allen is initially tolerant of his wife’s serial infidelities but reaches a breaking point when he kills two of her lovers before strangling his spouse. Highsmith’s mordantly unsettling narrative anticipates the mimetic fascination with murder in postmodern popular culture that ever since Thomas De Quincey’s 1827 satirical essay on the subject has abounded in fiction, nonfiction, and film. Writing against the grain of post-World War II conformism, Highsmith proleptically addresses issues of maladaptation in her portrait of a repressed sociopath who attempts to mask his inner rage via the sublimation of aesthetic pursuits