Delinquent dogs and the Molise malaise: negotiating suburbia in John Fante’s “My Dog Stupid”

This article explores ideas of suburban masculinity in “My Dog Stupid” (1986), a comic novella by the critically neglected novelist and screenwriter John Fante. Placing the text within the context of the twentieth-century suburban “canon,” I argue that Fante complicates and critiques the dystopian image of American suburbia that has dominated both fictional and sociological representations of this environment over the past seventy years

The Extreme Overabundance of Molybdenum in Two Metal-Poor Stars

We report determinations of the molybdenum abundances in five mildly to extremely metal-poor turnoff stars using five Mo II lines near 2000A. In two of the stars, the abundance of molybdenum is found to be extremely enhanced, as high or higher than the neighboring even-Z elements ruthenium and zirconium. Of the several nucleosynthesis scenarios envisioned for the production of nuclei in this mass range in the oldest stars, a high-entropy wind acting in a core-collapse supernova seems uniquely capable of the twin aspects of a high molybdenum overproduction confined to a narrow mass range. Whatever the details of the nucleosynthesis mechanism, however, this unusual excess suggests that very few individual nucleosynthesis events were responsible for the synthesis of the light trans-Fe heavy elements in these cases, an unexpected result given that both are only moderately metal-poor.Comment: updated in v2, including text missing from the third-to-last paragraph in the published versio

'Then came a departure': writing loss in the Middle Generation

Building on recent studies of twentieth-century elegy, this thesis examines the re-working of elegiac tropes in the poetry of Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman and Robert Lowell - four writers among the Middle Generation of American poets who share a persistent preoccupation with loss. As personal and national disappointments and bereavements are reflected in their distinctly elegiac poetics, their work overtly questions not only the possibility of finding consolation, but also the worth of their subject and the ability of language to express, with any conviction or accuracy, what has been lost. Highly conscious of the elegiac tradition, their work collectively distorts this genre, moulding it into a flexible mode which is more readily able to reflect the historical and cultural developments of the mid-twentieth century. Countering the still-prevalent view of these poets as “confessional” writers, this thesis’ focus on elegy challenges critics who have dismissed these four as solipsistic or narcissistic. Instead, they emerge as a group who were deeply invested in understanding their contemporary scene and whose most significant relationships were textual, rather than biographical. Their writing reveals an ongoing and serious engagement with one another’s work, as they built on each other’s poetic experiments. The thesis complicates the canonical divide which has entrenched these poets as the mainstream establishment, pitted against a more radical “postmodern” avant-garde, which includes the Beats, Black Mountain and the New York School. Through close textual analysis and an exploration of their links with Elizabeth Bishop, Schwartz, Jarrell, Berryman and Lowell are posited as poets whose engagement with the elegy has significantly altered the post-World War II poetic landscape

“As easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket”: Animetaphor in Raymond Chandler and Jonathan Lethem

In developing the hard-boiled style, through his iconic Philip Marlowe series, Raymond Chandler hoped to redeem detective fiction from being, as he believed it, “a cheap, shoddy, utterly lost kind of writing” and move it into the realms of “something that intellectuals claw one another over”. A key part of that style is what Jonathan Lethem has termed Chandler’s “vernacular surrealism”. In particular, animal imagery abounds in his work. From the opening of The Big Sleep (1939), where Marlowe encounters “trees trimmed as carefully as poodle dogs”, to his animalistic femme fatales, animal figuration allows Chandler to skewer his subject, with linguistic economy and wit. In Jonathan Lethem’s Gun, with Occasional Music (1994), however, Chandler’s metaphorical, non-present animals are actualised. Taking for his epigraph one of Chandler’s characteristic wisecracks from the late novel Playback (1958)—“the subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket”— the dystopian society of Lethem’s hybrid noir-sci-fi is home to “evolved” animals who have been genetically developed to act like humans, but who are treated like second-class citizens, including the detective’s nemesis, the kangaroo-gangster, Joey Castle. Looking at Lethem’s appreciative pastiche of Chandler’s hardboiled style, which allows him to build his dystopian world with sharp and disorienting brevity, this chapter explores the disruptive function of Lethem’s literal animals in the novel’s aggressively policed present, where citizens are kept in a state of government-sanctioned amnesia. Drawing together these strands on animetaphor and memory, I argue that the novel unsettles the assumption that humans constitute an evolutionary pinnacle, supporting Deborah Bird Rose’s contention that noir—with its focus on self-destructive protagonists and its blurring of the lines between criminal and victim—is an exemplary genre for criticising the problems of the Anthropocene

Tattoos, deviance and consumer culture in North American television: Criminal Minds, CSI: NY and Law and Order

This chapter offers three case studies of the depiction of tattoos in North American TV crime drama, in order to interrogate the multiple ironies at play in the cultural politics of the "Tattoo Renaissance"

Origins and Evolutions: The Brutal History of Detective Fiction

The role of animals in detective fiction is both critically marginal and historically integral. Accordingly, the aim of this introductory chapter is to begin to redress the curious lack of creatures in critical engagements with the detective form and in doing so to reconceive the genre as one in which the question of species is key. To do so, we offer two case studies. In the first we explore the origins of the detective form in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), a story in which the perpetrator is discovered to be a “large fulvous Ourang-Outang of the East Indian Islands”. In the second case study, we turn to Agatha Christie’s A Pocket Full of Rye (1953) to explore the splicing together of figurative and literal depictions of animals in the evolution of detective fiction