LIT 327 Essay 1 F20
Prof. Coppola
Crime and Punishment in Literature
Essay #1
For this assignment, please select ONE (1) of the following prompts and write a double-
spaced 4-6 page essay of roughly 1,000 – 1,500 words. Your essay should follow MLA
style (that means no cover pages, no running heads, no footnotes), with in-text references
for your quotations and a works cited page listing . If you have any questions about
formatting, consult the Purdue Owl writing center here and make your paper look like the
example. Please submit your paper to turnitin.com by the deadline listed on
Blackboard. See the Syllabus/Course Information section to find the Turnitin.com login
and password.
1) Sean McCann has argued that hard-boiled fiction is fundamentally a parable about the
economic crises of the day (i.e. the Depression and the New Deal.) Specifically, he
argues:
The Big Sleep is an allegory of economic predation in which the vernacular
energy of the white ethnic falls prey to the economic elite. “To hell with the rich.
They made me sick,” Marlowe notes at one point, and Chandler’s novel suggests
that the image is literally intended. At its heart, The Big Sleep is a gothic tale of
the way that the wealthy survive by leeching the vitality of the forthright and
honest.
How do issues of wealth and class, exploitation and co
uption play out in The Big Sleep
and the other texts we’ve read? In a thoughtful essay, compare and contrast Chandler’s
novel to a story by another author using McCann’s argument as a frame for your analysis.
2) In “The Simple Art of Murder,” Raymond Chandler criticizes the stilted and contrived
formulas of classical detective fiction, and praises Dashiell Hammett’s work, which he
values for its wised-up, hard-boiled attitude and its willingness to actually talk about “the
world you live in,” modern u
an society in all its ugliness, alienation and co
uption.
Yet he says that Hammett didn’t go far enough:
In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be
pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the
aucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go
who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this
kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a
complete man, and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a
ather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without
thought of it, and certainly without saying it.
In a thoughtful essay, test this claim against Chandler’s The Big Sleep, along with at least
one other story we’ve read.
3) Consider the following observation by the critic Steven Marcus:
In Hammett’s stories, what the Continental Op soon discovers is that the “reality”
that anyone involved will swear to is in fact itself a construction, a fa
ication, a
fiction, a faked and alternate reality—and that it has been gotten together before
he ever a
ived on the scene. The Op’s work is therefore to deconstruct,
decompose, deplot and defictionalize that “reality” and to construct or reconstruct
out of it a true fiction, i.e., an account of what “really” happened…yet that true
fiction a
ived at by the Op at the end of the story is no more plausible—nor is it
meant to be—than the stories that have been told to him by tall parties, guilty or
innocent, in the course of his work. The Op may catch the real thief or collar the
actual crook—that is not entirely the point. What is the point is that the story,
account, or chain of events that the Op winds up with as “reality” is no more
plausible and no less ambiguous than the stories he meets with at the outset.
How well do you think this applies not just to “The Golden Horseshoe” but to the other
detective stories we’ve read as well? What do you think these stories are trying to show
about “truth” and “reality”—and what does that imply for the society that they speak to.
Discuss at two stories by different authors in your answer.
4) Here’s another critic, Gill Plain:
[Chandler’s] criminal fictions are, first and foremost, na
atives of besieged
masculinity and love co
upted that seek to explain the paradoxical vulnerability
of men within patriarchal society…Marlowe, in his isolation, is haunted by the
odies that su
ound him, bodies that he knows he cannot possess, but which he
seeks, in masculine self-defense (or self-assertion), to explain and contain.
In a thoughtful essay that analyzes The Big Sleep and at least one other text, explore the
extent to which men are “paradoxically vulnerable” in these stories. In what way do
odies (their own, and others) haunt them? What does this imply about the sexual/gender
oles imagined by detective fiction?
5) In writing about classical detective fiction, D.A. Miller has drawn attention to the
“detective’s
illiant super-vision and the police supervision that it embodies.” The
entrance of the detective “marks an explicit
inging-under-surveillance of the entire
world of the na
ative.” Yet Miller says that the classic detective story works to quickly
confine “the fearful prospect of absolute surveillance under which everything would be
known, incriminated and policed” by “localizing the investigation”—that is, by inevitably
catching the crook and showing that the crime (and the detective’s supervision) were
abe
ations and in no way part of “normal” life. As such, Miller suggests that classical
detective fiction produces a “social innocence” where everyday life is imagined to be
“outside” surveillance and essentially untouched by crime. In a thoughtful essay, explore
the kind of super-vision (and supervision) to found in one of the Sherlock Holmes stories
and compare it to a text by another author we have read. Just how socially innocent is the
world of Holmes in the end, and is it substantially different from the worlds of other
detectives?
6) Chandler once said that “the ideal mystery is one that you would read if the end is
missing.” Taking this quote as a point of departure, analyze the ending of The Big Sleep
and compare it to the conclusion of another text that we’ve read. How well do those
endings resolve (or not resolve) what really goes on, and what really is at issue, in your
texts?
9) Carolyn Reitz draws attention to the way in which domestic and imperial concerns are
intertwined in classical detective stories—specifically that the attempt to
ing to order
the anti-social impulses of domestic crime gets linked up, in complex ways, with a desire
to police the boundaries of the nation at a time when empire is expanding and the
homeland was perceived to be under threat by a variety of foreign “others.” In a
thoughtful essay that compares one classical story and one hard-boiled story, analyze
how the detective story engaged with the hopes and fears attached to imperialism, foreign
cultural influence and/or immigration.