Background
Irwin, John Thomas was born on April 24, 1940 in Houston, Texas, United States. Son of William Henry and Marguerite Harriet (Hunsaker) Irwin.
( Early in the twentieth century a new character type eme...)
Early in the twentieth century a new character type emerged in the crime novels of American writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler: the "hard-boiled" detective, most famously exemplified by Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. Unlike the analytical detectives of nineteenth-century fiction, such as Edgar Allan Poe’s Inspector Dupin, the new detectives encountered cases not as intricate logical puzzles but as stark challenges of manhood. In the stories of these characters and their criminal opposites, John T. Irwin explores the tension within ideas of American masculinity between subordination and independence and, for the man who becomes "his own boss," the conflict between professional codes and personal desires. He shows how, within different works of hard-boiled fiction, the professional either overcomes the personal or is overcome by it, ending in ruinous relationships or in solitary integrity, and how within the genre all notions of manly independence are ultimately revealed to be illusions subordinate to fate itself. Tracing the stylistic development of the genre, Irwin demonstrates the particular influence of the novel of manners, especially the writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald. He goes on to argue that, from the time of World War II, when hard-boiled fiction began to appear on the screen in film noir just as women entered the workforce in large numbers, many of its themes came to extend to female empowerment. Finally, he discusses how these themes persist in contemporary dramatic series on television, representing the conflicted lives of Americans into the twenty-first century.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801890802/?tag=2022091-20
( In The Mystery to a Solution, John Irwin brilliantly ex...)
In The Mystery to a Solution, John Irwin brilliantly examines the deeper significance of the analytical detective genre which Poe created and the meaning of Borges' efforts to "double" the genre's origins one hundred years later. Combining history, literary history, and practical and speculative criticism, Irwin pursues the issues underlying the detective story into areas as various as the history of mathematics, classical mythology, the double-mirror structure of self-consciousness, the anthropology of Evans and Frazer, the structure of chess, the mind-body problem, the etymology of the word labyrinth, and dozens of other topics. Irwin mirrors the aesthetic impact of the genre by creating in his study the dynamics of a detective story--the uncovering of mysteries, the accumulation of evidence, the tracing of clues, and the final solution that ties it all together.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801846501/?tag=2022091-20
( "This is major scholarship, both as it contributes to A...)
"This is major scholarship, both as it contributes to American history of ideas and as it offers a brilliant new interpretation of major nineteenth-century American writers."--J. Hillis Miller
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300024711/?tag=2022091-20
( In The Mystery to a Solution, John Irwin brilliantly ex...)
In The Mystery to a Solution, John Irwin brilliantly examines the deeper significance of the analytical detective genre which Poe created and the meaning of Borges' efforts to "double" the genre's origins one hundred years later. Combining history, literary history, and practical and speculative criticism, Irwin pursues the issues underlying the detective story into areas as various as the history of mathematics, classical mythology, the double-mirror structure of self-consciousness, the anthropology of Evans and Frazer, the structure of chess, the mind-body problem, the etymology of the word labyrinth, and dozens of other topics. Irwin mirrors the aesthetic impact of the genre by creating in his study the dynamics of a detective story―the uncovering of mysteries, the accumulation of evidence, the tracing of clues, and the final solution that ties it all together.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801854660/?tag=2022091-20
Irwin, John Thomas was born on April 24, 1940 in Houston, Texas, United States. Son of William Henry and Marguerite Harriet (Hunsaker) Irwin.
Following a stint in the United States Navy, he received his Master"s degree and Doctor of Philosophy in English from Rice University.
He is the Decker Professor in the Humanities and Professor in The Writing Seminars and the English Department at Johns Hopkins University. Irwin received his Bachelor"s Degree in English at the University of Saint Thomas in Houston. He began his teaching career as an assistant professor in the English department at Johns Hopkins University in 1970, but left Johns Hopkins in 1974 to become the editor of The Georgia Review at the University of Georgia Doctor Irwin returned to Johns Hopkins to become professor and chair of The Writing Seminars department.
After that he accepted a joint appointment in the English department and received an endowed chair, the Decker Professorship in the Humanities, in 1984.
F. T. (Editor), Words Brushed by Music: Twenty-Five Years of the Johns Hopkins Series (Johns Hopkins: and Fiction, Foreword by Anthony Hecht (Baltimore, Doctor of Medicine: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). (as John Bricuth), As Long As lieutenant"s Big: A Narrative Poem (Baltimore, Doctor of Medicine: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
( Early in the twentieth century a new character type eme...)
( In The Mystery to a Solution, John Irwin brilliantly ex...)
( In The Mystery to a Solution, John Irwin brilliantly ex...)
( "This is major scholarship, both as it contributes to A...)
( "This is major scholarship, both as it contributes to A...)
Served with United States Naval Reserve, 1963-1966. Member of American Academy Arts and Sciences, Tudor and Stuart Club, F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, Faulkner Society, Poe Studies Association (vice president 1995-1997), Association Literature Scholars and Critics.
Married Laura Elizabeth Scott, September 23, 1978 (divorced 1991). Married Meme Amosso, May 29, 1993.