Crime Fiction, Bad Living, and the Anthropocene

Jennifer Fay has called film noir “the genre most devoted to the arts of bad living.” Taking up this argument, Lucas Hollister discusses how crime fiction and film—specifically French and American strains—can be read in light of the modes of ecological awareness characteristic of the Anthropocene.

Lucas Hollister is Associate Professor of French and Italian Languages and Literatures at Dartmouth College. A specialist of twentieth and twenty-first-century French literature and film, he is the author of Beyond Return: Genre and Cultural Politics in Contemporary French Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2019). His recent work includes articles on French crime fiction in Genre, MLN, and L’Esprit créateur; an article on noir and ecological awareness in PMLA; and a double issue of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies on “Frontiers of Ecocriticism,” which he guest edited with Roger Celestin and Eliane DalMolin.