ENG 112 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, The Purloined Letter
10 Sep 2017
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Document Summary
Reacher is a version of the detective archetype. In crime fiction, crimes happen for three reasons. Reacher abides by a rigid moral and behavioural code. Reacher is a version of the archetypal american hero. An archetype is a universal literary symbol. They are universal in the sense that (1) we find them in a wide range of literary works and (2) each of us finds them meaningful. A character archetype is a universal character type. If a particular work of fiction is popular, then we tend to assume that the work has archetypal characters- each of whom is recognizable to a wide range of people. Why i love lee child"s jack reacher novels . No one, i imagine, values child for the quality of his prose. One can hardly find, i the entire corpus of the work, a single sentence worthy of independent admiration. This is genre fiction at its most basic. Oedipus the king, shakespeare vs. hamlet, shakespeare.
