Essay about The Power of Horace McCoy’s They Shoot...

The Power of Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Professor’s Comment: The premise of this essay is to highlight the capacity of Noir literature to defy Modernist values and pioneer later avant-garde literary movements. This student produced a focused, organized, well supported essay. Nearly half a century has passed since most films and texts in the Noir tradition were created, yet one may wonder how much is really known about these popular American products. Scholars remain fascinated by many aspects of Film Noir, yet it appears that its fictional precursors (such as the texts of Cain, McCoy and Hammett) may have been too quickly ignored within the canon. Many have enthusiastically studied, for example, Film Noir’s†¦show more content†¦In its commitment to entropy and semi-nihilistic sense of an ending, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? expresses Post-Modern themes of chaos and anarchy, and critiques of Modernist (a) meta-narrative, (b) idealism and (c) abstract theorizing. In order to discuss such reiteration and negation of Modernist themes in the novel, a brief discussion of Modernism is necessary. The term ‘Modernism’ refers to the drastic shift in aesthetic and cultural values of art and literature following the First World War. The movement marked a noticeable break from the ordered, stable and inherently ‘meaningful’ texts of the nineteenth century and from Victorian optimism, instead presenting a profoundly pessimistic picture of society. In literature, Modernism became synonymous with the works of Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, Yeats, Pound and Stein, among others. Recognizing the failure of language to ever fully communicate meaning (â€Å"That’s not it at all, that’s not what I meant at all† laments Eliot’s Prufrock), the Modernists were usually more concerned with an exploration of form than the development of content. In doing so, it established a new fragmented, non-chronological style of poetic narration and form. Modernism’s acclaimed emphasis on formal experimentation, however, was also the source of its derision: the movement was