Perplexing Plots : : Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder / / David Bordwell.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Columbia University Press Complete eBook-Package 2023
• VerfasserIn: Bordwell, David,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Columbia University Press, , [2023]; ©2023
• Year of Publication: 2023
• Language: English
• Series: Film and Culture Series
• Physical Description: 1 online resource :; 93 b&w film stills
• Other title: Frontmatter --; 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
• Format: Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
• ISBN: 9780231556552; 9783110749670; 9783111319292; 9783111318912; 9783111319186; 9783111318264
• DOI: 10.7312/bord20658
• Access: restricted access
• Hierarchical level: Monograph
• Statement of Responsibility: David Bordwell.

Narrative innovation is typically seen as the domain of the avant-garde. However, techniques such as nonlinear timelines, multiple points of view, and unreliable narration have long been part of American popular culture. How did forms and styles once regarded as “difficult” become familiar to audiences?In Perplexing Plots, David Bordwell reveals how crime fiction, plays, and films made unconventional narrative mainstream. He shows that since the nineteenth century, detective stories and suspense thrillers have allowed ambitious storytellers to experiment with narrative. Tales of crime and mystery became a training ground where audiences learned to appreciate artifice. These genres demand a sophisticated awareness of storytelling conventions: they play games with narrative form and toy with audience expectations. Bordwell examines how writers and directors have pushed, pulled, and collaborated with their audiences to change popular storytelling. He explores the plot engineering of figures such as Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, Alfred Hitchcock, Dorothy Sayers, and Quentin Tarantino, and traces how mainstream storytellers and modernist experimenters influenced one another’s work. A sweeping, kaleidoscopic account written in a lively, conversational style, Perplexing Plots offers an ambitious new understanding of how movies, literature, theater, and popular culture have evolved over the past century.