They thought of themselves as being avant-garde in a popular genre. The book was about major creators of the hard-boiled genre…famous people who wrote between the 1920s and 1950s or so and wrote the fiction that we now think of as the hard-boiled crime story. SM: Nothing could make me happier! My most recent book was called “A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government,” and the first was called “Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism.” That book was kind of about that pastoral tendency. Empson…that it’s a kind of literature that puts complex ideas in simple containers.Ī: You have written two books in the past decade about the intersection of literature and politics. He sees the graphic novel as a form of modern pastoralism in the sense of the word used by W. I haven’t seen anything that leads me to think that they’re generically suited to some subject matter or some reader rather than another. I did a tutorial a couple of years ago on the graphic novel, so I’ve read the big ones, the ones that people talk about a lot. SM: I don’t have any assumption about that at all.

All the conventional associations are still there in Moore’s novel.Ī: What do you think of graphic novels as expressions of political realities? It fits very interestingly with our class, because you can see how powerful the idea of the totalitarian society was, which was generated out of the mid-20th century U.S. But you know, I thought it was pretty clever. The gender and sexuality stuff just seems so out of date. SM: Well, I dunno! I found it really engaging and striking, and really hokey in lots of ways. When I was sick, I was reading the Alan Moore graphic novel “V for Vendetta.” It’s fantastic, very amusing, and clever. He’s using the conventions of the hard-boiled crime fiction genre, and he’s got a detective who has Tourette’s Syndrome.

In my car right now, I’m listening to “Motherless Brooklyn” by Jonathan Lethem, which is, amazingly, something I’ve never read. It’s a really good book I’m enjoying it very much. I’m reading Susan Choi’s “The Foreign Student.” I’m reading it in particular because my colleague Amy Tang will be talking about it at the Center for Humanities Monday night, and I wanted to be familiar with what she is talking about. Sean McCann: Pretty much always reading for pleasure. McCann sat down with The Argus to discuss graphic novels, the rise of the American presidency, and the future of the novel. A Faulkner scholar, McCann specializes in the study of post-Civil War American literature and has written two critically acclaimed books on the relationship between American literature and politics. Professor of English and Chair of the English Department Sean McCann has been teaching at Wesleyan since 1993.

Gumshoe America by Sean McCann