For the most part, literary explorations of the urban context tend to focus on the emergence of various forms of violence as unavoidable by-products of life in the city. Starting with the 1930s, the appearance and great expansion of the mystery novel and, more recently, of an extensive phenomenon like noir literature have somehow monopolized the critical discussion, generating a variety of interpretive theories, as well as a number of stereotypes. The research moves along two main lines of investigation: the first concentrates on a re-examination of the reciprocal influence that writers, philosophers and intellectuals engaged in the discourse on city violence and alienation have had on each other (among them Baudelaire, Nietzsche and Benjamin vis a vis Poe and Melville, and down to Bellow and Salinger, Auster and Pynchon). The second part of the research, instead, is devoted to a study of that ever increasing number of writers, both affirmed and emerging, who in Europe and the U. S. have been more and more attracted within the typical domain of noir, a tendency that has often been interpreted in terms of its increasing appeal to an essentially dark urban imagination. In retracing and partially redefining, in a comparative perspective, patterns of reciprocal contamination between mainstream and noir literatures, the research aims also at revising the stereotyped view of urban violence as a product of single, or collective, criminal behaviors, in favor of a more complex perspective that looks at violence also as a phenomenon induced by the deterioration of the living conditions of urban environments. Finally, it is against the background of this hypothesis of an anonymous violence mainly caused by the carelessness of local and national public institutions that our research intends to verify the supposed heightened concern of noir fiction to contemporary social matters.
Three are the main points of innovation of the present research, matching its theree main stages of development, namely¿a) a revision of interpretive and narrative cliches concerning urban violence as a product of single or collective criminal behaviors; b) the gradual merging, in fiction, of the two contiguous semantic fields of violence and malaise within an urban context; c) the parallel transformation of the classical mystery novel into several sub-genres, generically called noir fiction, often distinguished by marked social overtones.
a) The fictional representation of urban violence has been steadily moving from that of single criminals/groups of criminals to that of various phenomena often directly engendered by, or simply consequential to, institutional, collective, and anonymous responsibilities ¿ not necessarily judged as criminal deeds ¿ whose consequences, nevertheless, may often lead to calamitous events. Early signs of this trasformation may be detected in the so-called proletarian novel of the 1930s (Daniel Aaron's Writers on the Left; 1961), as well as in prototypical radical social satires as Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust (1939) in which the perversity of ruthless myth-makers in Hollywood is already exposed with particularly sharp accents. That same vein is clearly discernible, in later years, in a number of novels by literary champions like John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, or Saul Bellow, as well as in other prominent authors who, in the second half of the XXth Century contribute to the success of the non-fiction novel, as in the case of Truman Capote, Joan Didion and Norman Mailer. finally, since the mid-Sixties Thomas Pynchon starts turning that critical discourse of anonymous violence within urban contexts into what will become his typical discourse on paranoia (P. Simonetti, Paranoia Blues, 2009), a recurrent theme of his mature production, while at the same time one of the most influential strains in the fiction of many of his contemporaries.
b) The second main point of innovation consists in testing the viability of the critical assumption concerning the frequent overlapping, in contemporary fiction, of the urban violence motive with that of the insurgence of a psychological discomfort that is merely due to the living conditions experienced in urban environments. The French existentialist movement of the 1940s and '50s has deeply influenced both the European and the American literary scenarios, to the extent that the motive of various forms of malaise determined by urban compulsive behaviors has become a central feature of the international literary scene. Among the U. S. authors more directly devoted to that thematic choice, Bernard Malamud and Walker Percy seem to exert the most influence over a number of more recent writers moving in that same line, which include prominent names in postmodern fiction, from Kurt Vonnegut to Philip Roth, from Paul Auster to Don DeLillo. As Daniela Daniele shows in Città senza mappa. Paesaggi urbani e racconto postmoderno in America (1994) parody is a crucial ingredient for contemporary authors who, like Pynchon and Barthelme, approach the theme of urban alienation as an extension of the Modernist's early treatment of that subject.
c) Finally, the last original subject to be addressed by our research has to do with the transformation of the classical mystery novel into genre, or popular fiction, a phenomenon currently dominated by what is commonly described as noir narratives. Studies like Ralph Willett's The Naked City. Urban Crime Fiction in USA (1996), B. Docherty's American Crime Fiction: Studies in the Genre (1988) and most of all S. Soitos's The Blues Detective (1996), show how relevant the African American component has been in terms of enhancing the relevance of social discourse within genre fiction. Starting in the 1920's and 1930's, both Rudolph Fisher and Chester Himes have contributed to build up a vernacular tradition in which most forms of crime within the black city are directly determined by social pressure from the outside¿so much so, that still nowdays, popular black mystery writers like Walter Mosley use noir fiction to dramatize particularly important events in African American history which have been invariably determined by particularly harsh social conditions. To conclude, it is interesting to note how this particular quality of noir fiction, was also emphasized, in a totally different cultural context, by Massimo Carlotto in his The black album. Il noir tra cronaca e romanzo (2014), a book hinged on the thesis that the genre is "a veritable mirror of social idiosincrasies", virtually capable "to annul the borders between report and narration". It is the conviction of all the participants that the three original points illustrated above offer a variety of possibilities to contribute significantly to the advancement of the studies in this particular field.