ENGL206 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Masculinity, Set Piece (Filmmaking), Dorothy L. Sayers
22 Aug 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
ENGL206
Session 1 - 2017
Week 9
Lecture 1
Hound of the Baskervilles
•Compelling plot
•What happens in clear, unlike other Gothic texts — beginning, middle and an end, crime
committed, help sought, crime solved
•All classic detective fiction works on principle of delayed satisfaction
•In the end, we will know, unlike postmodern texts
•Detective fiction attracts critics of very fabric and rationale
❖Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder
•Attacks detective fiction works, esp. work of gothic modes
•“Even Einstein couldn’t get very far if three hundred treatises of the high physics were published
every year, and several thousands other in some form or another were hanging round in
excellent condition waiting to be read.”
•“The good detective story competes only with the dead…”
•“Every detective story writer makes mistakes, of course, and none will ever know as much as he
should. Doyle made mistakes which completely invalidated some of his stories, but he was a
pioneer, and Holmes after all is mostly an attitudes and a few dozen lines of unforgettable
dialogue”
❖John Fowles on HOTB
•“The whole description of Grimpen Mire, for instance, is Romantic-Urban nonsense… They are
far more an irritating than lethal hazard at night; by day you mistake their livid green for grass
once only…”
•Yet, we can still read it as a cultural document that manages to capture anxieties and problematic
uncertainties that have nothing to do w prosaic facts.
•Why is HOTB on our unit?
•Relies on lies and extravagant fantasies
•Imagination and power of it — truths the Gothic deals with are subjective
•Mobilises well-established Gothic tropes with sophistication and skill
•Impact of cultural significance of the story
•Qualities of detective fiction also inform the narrative
•High modernist texts — elite texts
•Suspends the moral significance of the most conservative of genres
•Praises certainty and formal terms undermined by semantic instability and primes of meaning
that emerge outside of the frame
of 37 49
