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Perplexing plots : popular storytelling and the poetics of murder / David Bordwell.

By: Material type: TextTextSeries: Film and culturePublisher: New York : Columbia University Press, [2023]Description: 1 online resource illustrationsContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • computer
Carrier type:
  • online resource
ISBN:
  • 9780231556552
  • 0231556551
Subject(s): Genre/Form: Additional physical formats: Print version: Perplexing plotsDDC classification:
  • 813/.087209 23/eng/20221121
LOC classification:
  • PS374.D4 B67 2023
Online resources:
Contents:
Intro -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Mass Art as Experimental Storytelling -- Part I -- 1. The Art Novel Meets 1910s Formalism -- 2. Making Confusion Satisfactory: Modernism and Other Mysteries -- 3. Churn and Consolidation: The 1940s and After -- Part II -- 4. The Golden Age Puzzle Plot: The Taste of the Construction -- 5. Before the Fact: The Psychological Thriller -- 6. Dark and Full of Blood: Hard-Boiled Detection -- 7. The 1940s: Mysteries in Crossover Culture -- 8. The 1940s: The Problem of Other Minds, or Just One -- Part III -- 9. The Great Detective Rewritten: Erle Stanley Gardner and Rex Stout -- 10. Viewpoints, Narrow and Expansive: Patricia Highsmith and Ed McBain -- 11. Donald Westlake and the Richard Stark Machine -- 12. Tarantino, Twists, and the Persistence of Puzzles -- 13. Gone Girls: The New Domestic Thriller -- Conclusion: The Power of Limits -- Notes -- Index
Summary: "Narrative innovation is often thought to be the domain of the avant-garde or the experimental. However, manipulations of viewpoint and timelines and other unconventional techniques, have been part of popular American culture and storytelling since at least the 1940s. How did different forms and styles once regarded as "difficult," become mainstream and familiar to audiences? As David Bordwell demonstrates in Perplexing Plots, popular narratives have balanced innovation and convention to develop its own experimental impulses that both familiarize and surprise the viewer or readers. Bordwell argues that thrillers and detective tales, in particular, have been a major way in which popular culture allowed ambitious storytellers to experiment with narrative. They became a training ground for audiences' development of skills in understanding and enjoying complex fictions. Bordwell traces this history through the works and film adaptations of writers such as Patricia Highsmith, Erle Stanley Gardner, Rex Stout, and Richard Stark. While he focuses on the 1940s as a period when innovative storytelling began to become a permanent feature in popular culture, he also looks back to techniques from over more than a century. He also considers how these techniques have shaped the work of filmmakers from the 1940s on. Examining novels, plays, films, and radio drama. Bordwell shows how the mystery-based plot, usually hinging on a murder, and its variants have enlarged the techniques available to authors and the skill sets of audiences"-- Provided by publisher.
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Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (De Gruyter, viewed on February 15, 2023)

Includes bibliographical references and index

Intro -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Mass Art as Experimental Storytelling -- Part I -- 1. The Art Novel Meets 1910s Formalism -- 2. Making Confusion Satisfactory: Modernism and Other Mysteries -- 3. Churn and Consolidation: The 1940s and After -- Part II -- 4. The Golden Age Puzzle Plot: The Taste of the Construction -- 5. Before the Fact: The Psychological Thriller -- 6. Dark and Full of Blood: Hard-Boiled Detection -- 7. The 1940s: Mysteries in Crossover Culture -- 8. The 1940s: The Problem of Other Minds, or Just One -- Part III -- 9. The Great Detective Rewritten: Erle Stanley Gardner and Rex Stout -- 10. Viewpoints, Narrow and Expansive: Patricia Highsmith and Ed McBain -- 11. Donald Westlake and the Richard Stark Machine -- 12. Tarantino, Twists, and the Persistence of Puzzles -- 13. Gone Girls: The New Domestic Thriller -- Conclusion: The Power of Limits -- Notes -- Index

"Narrative innovation is often thought to be the domain of the avant-garde or the experimental. However, manipulations of viewpoint and timelines and other unconventional techniques, have been part of popular American culture and storytelling since at least the 1940s. How did different forms and styles once regarded as "difficult," become mainstream and familiar to audiences? As David Bordwell demonstrates in Perplexing Plots, popular narratives have balanced innovation and convention to develop its own experimental impulses that both familiarize and surprise the viewer or readers. Bordwell argues that thrillers and detective tales, in particular, have been a major way in which popular culture allowed ambitious storytellers to experiment with narrative. They became a training ground for audiences' development of skills in understanding and enjoying complex fictions. Bordwell traces this history through the works and film adaptations of writers such as Patricia Highsmith, Erle Stanley Gardner, Rex Stout, and Richard Stark. While he focuses on the 1940s as a period when innovative storytelling began to become a permanent feature in popular culture, he also looks back to techniques from over more than a century. He also considers how these techniques have shaped the work of filmmakers from the 1940s on. Examining novels, plays, films, and radio drama. Bordwell shows how the mystery-based plot, usually hinging on a murder, and its variants have enlarged the techniques available to authors and the skill sets of audiences"-- Provided by publisher.

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