Postpulp: Cold War American Detective Fiction and Postmodernism

Leah Pennywark, Purdue University

Abstract

While the origins and influences of postmodern literature are widely debated, scholars have not yet considered the influence of Cold War detective fiction, a genre that, like postmodernism, is fundamentally invested in epistemological inquiry. My project draws together two overlapping but distinct bodies of scholarship: work on Cold War narrative (which has already articulated its relevance to the emergence of postmodern identity, culture, and poetics), and recent increased attention to post-World War II detective fiction. By locating postmodern tropes—such as constructions of media, conspiracy and paranoia, consumerism, (a)historicity, and simulacra—in postwar detective fiction, this project offers a historical context for understanding the emergence of a new poetics centered on the epistemology of mystery. I read canonical postmodern texts (Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, E. L. Doctorow, and Ishmael Reed), which frequently appropriate the conventions of detective literature, through the lens of popular Cold War detective fiction (Mickey Spillane, Ross Macdonald, Evelyn Piper, Vera Caspary, Chester Himes, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine). My project is shaped by a sociological and historical approach to narrative that considers the cultural, economic, and political contexts, as well as questions of individual and national identity. Post-World War II detective literature critically impacted the development of US postmodernism through its engagement with national Cold War cultural narratives. These detective stories, following the pulp fiction of the first half of the twentieth century, are what I call postpulp. Produced from the 1940s to the 1970s, they follow pulp fiction and both precede and entwine with the genesis of postmodernism. Postpulp embodies intersections between mass and high culture, media and literature, and cultural epistemological uncertainty that would be crucial to the development of postmodernism. Postwar anxieties arose from increasing corporatization, consumerism, organized crime, and the US policy of the containment of Communism. Postpulp imagines solutions to the consumer-citizen crises of agency and knowledge through the figure of the male detective who offers reassurance that an imagined past national authenticity can be reclaimed through the performance of hardboiled masculinity or calls for a new understanding of Americanity. However, these narratives fail to offer sustained resolutions and instead produce the very epistemological gaps that postmodern fiction self-consciously widens. Postpulp texts and their gumshoes cobble together narratives of exceptionalism and certainty only to be unable to consistently perform those narratives. Scholarship on modern and contemporary American literature is increasingly invested sociopolitical concerns and the entanglement of narrative and state apparatus. Cold War detective fiction provides insight into the cultural, economic, and intellectual histories in which postmodern representations of state are rooted. By comparing some of the era’s most popular detective authors with contemporaneous postmodernist authors, my project shows that postpulp narratives, generally dismissed as formulaic genre fiction and fantasy fulfillment, should be considered in relation to the postmodern literary tradition that they have in fact helped to shape.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Duvall, Purdue University.

Subject Area

American literature

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