The Rashomon Effect and the Unreliable Narrator

Posted on by Michael Kahn
In my recent musings on unreliable narrators in literature and the law, I kept coming across the term “the Rashomon Effect.” Indeed, Google that term and you will get links to fascinating essays in a variety of fields ranging from psychology to anthropology to sociology to historical interpretations to the law. Stated simply, the “Rashomon effect” is…
+

The Unreliable Narrator and the Law

Posted on by Michael Kahn
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, let us now consider the unreliable narrator. Within the field of literature, the “unreliable narrator” is a storyteller who violates our trust. Most readers start a book quite literally taking the narrator at his word.  The unreliable narrator, however, is a storyteller who provides us with inaccurate or incomplete…
+

Don’t Pun Me, Bro

Posted on by Michael Kahn
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch recently published a piece on Fred Firestone, a friend and St. Louis businessman who travels to New York City once a month to co-host with his daughter Jo an event that the newspaper states “is drawing critical acclaim from the New York media and attracting sellout crowds to a club in Brooklyn for their wild and…
+

Nine Mysteries for Literary Snobs: A Compendium

Posted on by Michael Kahn
A while back, I did a post on the Poisoned Pen Press blog about the challenge of convincing literary snobs that there are indeed great works of literature that meet all criteria of that lowly genre known as Mystery. As I explained, there are 3 basic requirements of the genre: (a)  A mysterious murder or missing person or…
+

Mystery #8 for Literary Snobs: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon

Posted on by Michael Kahn
As Terry Rafferty notes in “Cops and Rabbis,” his review of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon “has in recent years become a zealous proselytizer for a more genre-inflected and plot-friendly sort of literary fiction.” Detective fiction has been one such genre, which he first explored in The Final Solution, a mystery set in the English countryside…
+

Mystery #6 for Literary Snobs: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

Posted on by Michael Kahn
Umberto Eco is a literary snob’s dream date. A towering intellectual, he is the author of numerous scholarly articles and books in the fields of literary criticism, semiotics, anthropology, and mass culture. Indeed, his list of international literary and scholarly awards is matched only by the number of honorary degrees he has received from universities around the world….
+