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Full Description
James Ellroy is an acclaimed yet controversial popular novelist. Since the publication of his first novel Brown's Requiem in 1981, Ellroy's eccentric "Demon Dog" persona and his highly stylized, often pornographically violent crime novels have continued to polarize both public and academic opinion. This book addresses the voyeuristic dimensions of Ellroy's fiction, one of the most significant yet underexplored issues in his work. Focusing exclusively on Ellroy's two collections of epic noir fiction, The L.A. Quartet and The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, it critically reflects on a vivid preoccupation with eyes, visual culture, and visual technologies that spans across both these bodies of work. Using a combination of psychoanalysis and postmodern and cultural theory, Nathan Ashman argues that Ellroy's fiction traces the development of the voyeur from a deviant and perverse "peeping tom" into a recognizable, contemporary "social type," a paranoid and obsessive viewer who is a product of the decentered and hallucinatory "cinematic" world that he inhabits. In particular, James Ellroy and Voyeur Fiction illuminates a convergence between voyeurism and recurring patterns of "ocularcentric crisis" in Ellroy's texts, as characters become continually unable to understand or interpret through vision. Alongside a thematic analysis of obsessive watching, Ashman also argues that Ellroy's works—particularly his later novels—are themselves voyeuristic, implicating the reader in these broader narrative patterns of both visual and epistemophilic obsession.
Contents
Introduction: 'Cam-Era': James Ellroy, Voyeurism and Contemporary Culture
Chapter 1: 'Cherchez la Femme': Voyeurism, Narrative Desire and the Female Body in The Black Dahlia
Chapter 2: 'They'll Believe Anything We Can Get on the Screen': Cinematizing the City in The Big Nowhere and L.A. Confidential
Chapter 3: 'Feast Your Eyes': White Jazz, Voyeurism and the Crisis of Ocularcentrism
Chapter 4: 'Window Peeping History': Voyeurising the Past in American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand
Chapter 5: 'You Can't Peep and Prowl Paper the Rest of Your Life': Blood's a Rover, Public Privacy and the Voyeuristic Pleasures of the Archive
Conclusion: Connecting THEN and NOW: Perfidia, LAPD 53 and the Value of Ellroy's 'Voyeur Fiction'
