Five Murders in a Fictional City

10.26686/wgtn.17006137 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

◽

Alasdair Sinclair

Keyword(s):

Building Block ◽

Reading Strategies ◽

Life Experience ◽

Real Life ◽

Reading Strategy ◽

Critical Discourse ◽

Unique Combination ◽

Dashiell Hammett ◽

The One

<p>Dashiell Hammett is best remembered for a series of attributes that are at best chimerical and at worst outright misleading. This thesis will briefly look at each of these red herrings and how they originated before offering an alternate theory for interpreting his work. The superseded reading strategies are: that he invented the hard-boiled detective – as exemplified by Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon; that he translated his real-life experience as a detective for the Pinkerton Detective Agency into his fiction, thereby giving it a realistic, quasi-factual quality; and his unique combination of the excess and hedonism of the "roaring 20s" with a brand of nascent communism are deeply coded in his fiction. The foundation for all of these misconceptions is the dialogue between Howard Haycraft's description of him in Murder for Pleasure and Raymond Chandler’s response, in the famous essay, “The Simple Art of Murder”. The one truth that they agree on, and which survives in the critical discourse is that Hammett was an innovative and effective prose stylist. This thesis looks past these conceptions of Hammett, and offers an alternate quality for which Hammett should be remembered: his reconfiguration of the detective formula not as a means in and of itself, but as a building block for stories that have a traditional novelistic value. This thesis uses five of the murders amongst the numerous killings in Red Harvest to illustrate this reading strategy in detail. Hammett's reconfiguration of this central genre feature lives on in numerous modern works of fiction and film that are broadly in the action or adventure genres.</p>

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Third World City in the Information Age

Encyclopedia of Digital Government ◽

10.4018/978-1-59140-789-8.ch236 ◽

2011 ◽

pp. 1541-1546

Author(s):

D. Sinha

Keyword(s):

Rural Areas ◽

Third World ◽

Life Experience ◽

Information Age ◽

Real Life ◽

World City ◽

World Cities ◽

The Third ◽

The One ◽

The Third World

It could be one of the great paradoxes of history that the third world continues to urbanize itself at a faster pace than the developed world. At the same time, third-world cities, inevitably at the cost of the rural areas, continue to play the game of one-upmanship in proclaiming themselves the best possible hub of the information and communication technology (ICT). Such a phenomenon is natural not only because in the third world the cities are the privileged sites or spaces in which any new and progressive process or event is supposed to take root but also because the cities, the firm favorites of the policymaking elite of the third world, are supposed to be the privileged channels in the trickle-down process of development. In this process, the hinterland (the suburbs and the rural areas, mostly in that order) fall behind. Thus, a veteran scholar of third-world urbanization, T. G. McGee (1971), described third world cities either as “enclaves” (spaces meant for the elite’s games surrounded by “hostile peasantry”) or as “beachheads” (centers of modernization and catalysts for economic growth) (p. 13). However, cities in the third world are not monolithic entities enjoying exclusive occupation by elites and other privileged sections of society. Our real-life experience shows that third-world cities that are inhabited by nearly one-third of the world’s urban population provide classic and shocking contrasts in terms of playing host to affluent, powerful citizenry on the one hand and to their underprivileged, powerless counterparts—ordinary people (the middle-middle/lower-middle classes downward) on the other hand. The latter, at best, possess only the legal attributes of citizenship, and, at worst, they are devoid of even that to remain utterly marginalized if not pulverized. It is in this setting that the third-world city opens itself up to the information age and its concomitant: digital governance. This article limits itself to drawing attention to the fate of the third-world city caught in the vortex of the information age and the associated rhetoric of salvation. In the process, it reveals certain general indicative trends. It does not provide any fixed blueprint for immediate crisis solving, keeping in mind the variety that exists in third-world cities despite a substantial degree of commonality among them. However, it does endorse the view (Visvanathan, 2001) that to “understand … spaces being continually defined by development we need sharper tools for the analysis of symbolic space and the interrelationship between historical events and social phenomena, which bring space, time and culture together” (p.182).

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The History of Conflict between Institutional and Native Hebrew in Israel

Iyunim, Multidisciplinary Studies in Israeli and Modern Jewish Society ◽

10.51854/bguy-34a101 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 34 ◽

pp. 9-35

Author(s):

Uri Mor

Keyword(s):

Formal Language ◽

Life Experience ◽

Native Speakers ◽

Real Life ◽

National Language ◽

The Other ◽

Popular Discourse ◽

Generational Identity ◽

History Of ◽

The One

Contemporary popular discourse on Hebrew prescriptivism betrays an interesting ambivalence: acceptance of institutional standards on the one hand and objection to normative intervention on the other. This ambivalence can be traced to the tension between the Language Committee and the Palestine Teachers’ Association during the Second Aliyah. Both advocated that Israel adopt a modern national language, but the former was in favor of a systematic language planning, while the latter was in favor of spontaneous language adoption. In the 1950s, a similar tension developed between the older generation and the Sabras (native speakers), whose generational identity had crystallized during the pre-State period. The language promoted by the former group was an institutional variety bound to a prescriptive norm, while that promoted by the latter was a native variety bound to conventional norms and real-life experience. The tension in these two episodes led to a deep cultural rift—one that is familiar to every Hebrew speaker in Israel—between the formal language of the state and the natural language of Hebrew speakers. A crosslinguistic perspective reveals a resemblance between Israeli Hebrew and European Late Dialect Selection languages, suggesting that the ambivalence towards prescriptivism in fact indicates ambivalence towards the national language, which is perceived, simultaneously, as a manifestation of a stable national identity and an institutional interference in individual speech

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The History of Conflict between Institutional and Native Hebrew in Israel

Iyunim, Multidisciplinary Studies in Israeli and Modern Jewish Society ◽

10.51854/bguy34-a101 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 34 ◽

pp. 9-35

Author(s):

Uri Mor

Keyword(s):

Formal Language ◽

Life Experience ◽

Native Speakers ◽

Real Life ◽

National Language ◽

The Other ◽

Popular Discourse ◽

Generational Identity ◽

History Of ◽

The One

Contemporary popular discourse on Hebrew prescriptivism betrays an interesting ambivalence: acceptance of institutional standards on the one hand and objection to normative intervention on the other. This ambivalence can be traced to the tension between the Language Committee and the Palestine Teachers’ Association during the Second Aliyah. Both advocated that Israel adopt a modern national language, but the former was in favor of a systematic language planning, while the latter was in favor of spontaneous language adoption. In the 1950s, a similar tension developed between the older generation and the Sabras (native speakers), whose generational identity had crystallized during the pre-State period. The language promoted by the former group was an institutional variety bound to a prescriptive norm, while that promoted by the latter was a native variety bound to conventional norms and real-life experience. The tension in these two episodes led to a deep cultural rift—one that is familiar to every Hebrew speaker in Israel—between the formal language of the state and the natural language of Hebrew speakers. A crosslinguistic perspective reveals a resemblance between Israeli Hebrew and European Late Dialect Selection languages, suggesting that the ambivalence towards prescriptivism in fact indicates ambivalence towards the national language, which is perceived, simultaneously, as a manifestation of a stable national identity and an institutional interference in individual speech.

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