Thesis (M.A.)--University of Montana, 2007. / Title from title screen. Description based on contents viewed Oct. 5, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 61-64).

This thesis challenges the traditional view of the 'femme fatale' as merely a dangerous and ravenous sexual predator who leads men into ruination. Critical, especially feminist, scholarship mostly regards the femme fatale as a sexist construction of a male fantasy and treats her as an expression of misogyny that ultimately serves to reaffirm male authority. But this thesis proposes alternative ways of viewing the femme fatale by showing how she can also serve as a figure for imagining female agency. As such, I focus on a particular character type that is distinct from the general archetype of the femme fatale because of the greater degree of agency she demonstrates. This 'criminal femme fatale' uses her sexual appeal and irresistible wiles both to manipulate men and to commit criminal acts, usually murder, in order to advance her goals with deliberate intent and full culpability. This thesis reveals and explains the agency of the criminal femme fatales in American Hardboiled crime fiction between the late 1920s and the end of World War II in the works of three authors: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain. The criminal femme fatales in the narratives of these authors show a subversive power and an ability to act - even though, or perhaps only if, this action is a criminal one. I show that these criminal femme fatales exhibit agency through their efforts to challenge not only the 'masculine' genre and the criminal space that this genre represents, but also to undercut the male protagonist's role and prove his failure in asserting control and dominance. Hammett's narratives provide good examples of how the criminal femme fatales function on a par with male gangsters in an underworld of crime and corruption. Chandler's work demonstrates a different case of absent/present criminal women who are set against the detective and ultimately question his power and mastery. Cain's narratives show the agency of the criminal femme fatales in the convergence between their ambition for social mobility and their sexual power over the male characters. To explain how these female characters exhibit agency, I situate this body of literature alongside contemporaneous legal and medical discourses on female criminality. I argue that the literary female criminal is a fundamentally different portrayal because she breaks the 'mad-bad' woman dichotomy that dominates both legal and medical discourses on female criminality. I show that the criminal femme fatales' negotiations of female agency within hardboiled crime fiction fluctuate and shift between the two poles of the criminalized and the medicalized women. These criminal femme fatales exhibit culpability in their actions that bring them into an encounter with the criminal justice system and resist being pathologized as women who suffer from a psychological ailment that affect their control. The thesis concludes that the ways in which the criminal femme fatales trouble normative socio-cultural conceptions relating to docile femininity and passive sexuality, not only destabilize the totality and fixity of the stereotype of the femme fatale in hardboiled crime fiction, but also open up broader debates about the representation of women in popular culture and the intersections between genre and gender.

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雷蒙‧錢德勒為冷硬派偵探小說的開山始祖之一，其文學地位卻不限於通俗小說大家。 其簡潔有力的文學筆觸及對於現代美國社會的深刻批判，讓他名列當代美國代表作家之列。 在錢德勒的筆觸下，洛杉磯城被深切刻畫成重要性不亞於偵探的重要主角。 故此，我在本論文將探討錢德勒對於洛杉磯身為美國現代大城的空間呈現，試圖找出其再現對於美國城市文學與偵探小說的積極影響。 在第二至第四章的本文中，第二章處理私家偵探與其出沒的洛杉磯之間的關係。 我發現漫遊者的概念也可被應用在冷硬派私家偵探的明查暗訪，這兩者在顯示現代城市的現代性方面，都是代表性的謀介。 透過漫遊者偵探的私家之眼，真實與想像的洛杉磯同時歷歷在目，而勒婓伏爾與索雅的空間理論為理解錢德勒筆下洛杉磯真實與想像的城市空間再現的一大利器。 故此，第三章運用索雅的第三空間概念來探討錢德勒的空間再現，發現其筆下墮落之城的種種暗黑角落，都是第三空間的再現，因為它們都顯現一種被宰制的空間呈現，別同於洛杉磯被大力推銷為夢想之城的想像空間。 第四章處理另一個被忽視但重要的第三空間。 藉由私家偵探親身探索洛杉磯城中不同族群的空間，我發現這些空間也是另一種第三空間的呈現，因為這些空間亦屬於被宰制壓迫的空間，而錢德勒對於洛杉磯城的空間再現並未遺忘這些他者族群被壓迫的空間，故此更能證明錢德勒不愧為刻畫現代化美國社會的文學大師。 / Raymond Chandler is a prestigious detective-story writer and the founding father of the hard-boiled detective fiction school, but he is not limited to this sub-genre of the crime fiction. His laconic style and the socially critical depiction of Los Angeles elevates him as a great writer in literature, high-brow and low-brow. Los Angeles city in his depiction becomes another protagonist of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe stories. In this thesis, I attempt to adopt a spatial reading of the Los Angeles city he depicts, so as to explore the meanings of the real and imagined spaces and their possibilities of resistance for future interpretations. Besides the first chapter as the introduction and the last chapter as the conclusion, in Chapter Two, I will first compare the private detective to the flâneur, thereby discovering the contribution of these figures to the discovery and representation of modernity in modern cities. Furthermore, I will utilize Lefebvre’s and Soja’s trialectics of spatiality to examine the real and imagined spaces in Chandler’s novels. By doing so, in Chapter Three I argue that Chandler’s vivid spatial representations of Los Angeles, especially the dark side of the city, are actually the real-and-imagined Thirdspace that represents the dominated spaces against the promotion of Los Angeles as a dream city. In Chapter Four, though Chandler’s spaces convincingly reflect the modernity of Los Angeles as a modern city, I further discover another possible site for the space of representation in his stories: the space of the racial Other. This discovery of another Thirdspace proves Chandler isn’t as much a racist as alleged, and it is the counter-space that provides the possibility of resistance for many future hard-boiled detective fiction writers of different ethnicities, and this can explain why Chandler’s hard-boiled detective has been massively appropriated.

Syftet med den här uppsatsen är att genomföra en jämförande studie av den klassiska Hollywood-deckaren, representerad av de tre första filmerna i Thin Man-serien, och film noir. Analysen utgår ifrån Thin Man-filmerna The Thin Man (1934), After the Thin Man (1936) och Another Thin Man (1939) och noir filmerna The Maltese Falcon (1941), Laura (1944), The Big Sleep (1946) och Dark Passage (1947). Den grundläggande teorin för uppsatsen är genreteori och hur den klassiska Hollywood-deckarfilmen skilde sig ifrån film noir. Analysen är uppdelad i fyra kapitel, i vilka olika delar av innehållet i både Thin Man-filmerna och de fyra exemplen av film noir analyseras. De olika kapitlen handlar om manliga huvudkaraktären, den kvinnliga huvudkaraktären, hur de olika filmerna hanterade ämnen berörande sex och sexualitet och hur samhället och människorna representeras i filmerna. Slutsats omfattar sedan en diskussion om uppsatsens resultat och svaret på varför Thin Man-filmerna inte räknas som film noir.

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Lesbian Detective Fiction: the outsider within is a creative writing thesis in two parts: a draft lesbian detective novel, titled Fatal Development (75%) and an exegesis containing a critical appraisal of the sub-genre of lesbian detective fiction, and of my own writing process (25%). Creative work: Fatal Development -- It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a dead body, but it didn’t seem to get any easier. -- When Dirk and Stacey discover a body in the courtyard of their Brisbane woolstore apartment, it is close friend and neighbour, Kersten Heller, they turn to for support. The police assume Stuart’s death was an accident, but when it emerges that he was about to take legal action against the woolstore’s developers, Bovine, Kersten decides there must be more to it. Her own apartment has flooded twice in a month and the builders are still in and out repairing defects. She discovers Stuart was not alone on the roof when he fell to his death and the evidence he had collected for his case against Bovine has gone missing. Armed with this knowledge, and fed up with the developer’s ongoing resistance to addressing the building’s structural issues, Kersten organises a class action against Bovine. Kersten draws on her past training as a spy to investigate Stuart’s death, hiding her activities, and details of her past, from her partner, Toni. Her actions bring her under increasing threat as her apartment is defaced, searched and bugged, and she is involved in a car chase across New Farm. Forced to fall back on old skills, old habits and memories return to the surface. When Toni discovers that Kersten has broken her promise to leave the investigation to the police, she walks out. The neighbouring – and heritage-listed – Riverside Coal development site burns to the ground, and Kersten and Dirk uncover evidence of a network of corruption involving developers and local government officials. After she is kidnapped in broad daylight, narrowly escaping from the boot of a moving car, Kersten is confident she is right, but with Toni not returning her calls, and many of the other residents selling up, including Dirk and Stacey, Kersten begins to question her judgment. In a desperate attempt to turn things around, Kersten calls on an old Agency contact to help prove Bovine was involved in Stuart’s death, her kidnapping, and ongoing corruption. To get the evidence she needs, Kersten plays a dangerous game: letting Bovine know she has uncovered their illegal operations in order to draw them into revealing themselves on tape. Hiding alone in a hotel room, Kersten is finally forced to confront her past: When Mirin didn’t come home that night, I was ready to go out and find her myself, disappear, and start a new life together somewhere far away. Instead they pulled me in before I could finish making arrangements, questioned me for hours, turned everything around. It was golden child to problem child in the space of a day. This time, she’s determined, things will turn out differently. Exegesis: The exegesis traces the development of lesbian detective fiction, including its dual origins in detective and lesbian fiction, to compare the current state of the sub-genre with the early texts and to establish the dominant themes and tropes. I focus particularly on Australian examples of the sub-genre, examining in detail Claire McNab’s Denise Cleever series and Jan McKemmish’s A Gap in the Records, in order to position my own lesbian detective novel between these two works. In drafting Fatal Development, I have attempted to include some of the political content and complexity of McKemmish’s work, but with a plot-driven narrative. I examine the dominant tropes and conventions of the sub-genre, such as: lesbian politics; the nature of the crime; method of investigation; sex and romance; and setting. In the final section, I explain the ways in which I have worked within and against the subgenre’s conventions in drafting a contemporary lesbian detective novel: drawing on tradition and subverting reader expectations. Throughout the thesis, I explore in detail the tradition of the fictional lesbian detective as an outsider on the margins of society, disrupting notions of power and gender. While the lesbian detective’s outsider status grants her moral agency and the capacity to achieve justice and generate change, she is never fully accepted. The lesbian detective remains an outsider within. For the lesbian detective, working within a system that ultimately discriminates against her involves conflict and compromise, and a sense of double-play in being part of two worlds but belonging to neither. I explore how this double-consciousness can be applied to the lesbian writer in choosing whether to write for a mainstream or lesbian audience.

This thesis reexamines the beginnings of Swedish hardboiled crime literature, in part tracking its lineage to American culture and unpacking Swedish identity. Following the introduction, the second chapter asserts how this genre began as a form of escapism, specifically in Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s Roseanna. The third chapter compares predecessor Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep with Roseanna, and how Sweden’s greater gender tolerance significantly outshining America’s is reflected in literature. The fourth chapter examines how Henning Mankell’s novels fail to fully accept Sweden’s complicity in neo-Nazism as an active component of Swedish identity. The final chapter reveals Helene Tursten’s Detective Inspector Huss engaging with gender and racial relations in unique ways, while also releasing the suppressive qualities found in the Swedish identity post-war. Therefore, this thesis will better contextualize the onset of the genre, and how its lineage reflects the fruits and the damages alike in the Swedish identity.