<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, May 18, 2008 at 4:36 AM, Adam Thornton <<a href="mailto:adam@io.com">adam@io.com</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
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On May 17, 2008, at 10:12 PM, dcooperv wrote:<br>
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You could probably put Hammett and Chandler in there, possibly on the<br>
irreligious side. I say this only because (IMO) it's near-impossible to have an<br>
intelligent discussion of the genre without acknowledging these two, given the<br>
significance of their contributions. I always saw them as existentialist more<br>
than anything else really. Of course, existentialism does not preclude<br>
religiosity by any means (and nothing bugs me like a false dichotomy!). Read<br>
Dostoeyevsky and Martin Buber for good examples of this.<br>
Can you give us a more specific idea of your thesis? If nothing else, this could<br>
spark some enlightening conversation.<br>
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And, man, Chandler is underrated.<br>
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That's some complex and delicious stuff there. Marlowe is *so* much smarter and better-educated than he lets on; one of my favorite not-quite-reliable narrators (there's the Wolfean connection). As far as I'm concerned, _The Big Sleep_ is one of the great books of the 20th Century. Chandler is--hey, another Wolfean connection--a genre writer who was *spectacularly* good, not just compared to the rest of the genre, but period.<br>
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Adam</font><div><div></div><div class="Wj3C7c"></div></div></blockquote><div> <br>Agreed that Marlowe is smarter than he pretends to be. He isn't phased when someone quotes Christopher Marlowe's Faust at him in The Long Goodbye for example. <br>
<br>As for "a more specific version of my thesis," I'm still in the preparation phase, so I don't have too much yet. At the moment I'm just trying to pin down a good reading list - I expect I'll be reading lots of this stuff over the summer.<br>
<br>-Matt<br></div></div><br>