I had a really cool moment in class today during our discussion of where Dashiell Hammett (if I spelled that wrong, a thousand apologies) fits in on the scale of literary modernism, the two ends being Virginia Woolf’s theory that literature should be a window into the conscious mind and Joseph Conrad’s idea that it should be “something something justice to the visible world.” The consensus was that our present author definitely fits more on the Conradian side of the equation, due to his almost obsessive preoccupation with not letting us into the minds of his characters and even going so far as to create a kind of unreliable narrator situation where we weren’t even sure if the surface information we were getting was right. Talk about confusing. I, of course, loved this. Even though pretty much every English teacher I’ve ever had persists in telling me that authorial intent […]
Original post by anniek