The Men Who Knew Too Much : Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock

Cover; Contents; Preface; Reading James with Hitchcock, Seeing Hitchcock through James; 1. National Bodies; 2. Secrets, Lies, and "Virtuous Attachments": The Ambassadors and The 39 Steps; 3. Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock after the American Century: Circulation and Nonreturn in The American Scene and Strangers on a Train; 4. Colonial Discourse and the Unheard Other in Washington Square and The Man Who Knew Too Much; 5. Bump: Concussive Knowledge in James and Hitchcock; 6. James's Birdcage/Hitchcock's Birds; 7. Sounds of Silence in The Wings of the Dove and Blackmail; 8. The Perfect Enigma.;Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock knew too much. Self-imposed exiles fully in the know, they approached American and European society as inside-outsiders, a position that afforded them a kind of double vision. Masters of their arts, manipulators of their audiences, prescient and pathbreaking in their techniques, these demanding and meticulous artists fiercely defended authorial and directorial control. Their fictions and films are obsessed with knowledge and its powers: who knows what? What is there to know? The Men Who Knew Too Much innovatively pairs these two greats, showing them to be at on. Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock knew too much. Self-imposed exiles fully in the know, they approached American and European society as inside-outsiders, a position that afforded them a kind of double vision. Masters of their arts, manipulators of their audiences, prescient and pathbreaking in their techniques, these demanding and meticulous artists fiercely defended authorial and directorial control. Their fictions and films are obsessed with knowledge and its powers: who knows what? What is there to know? The Men Who Knew Too Much innovatively pairs these two greats, showing them to be at once classic and contemporary. Over a dozen major scholars and critics take up works by James and Hitchcock, in paired sets, to explore the often surprising ways that reading James helps us watch Hitchcock and what watching Hitchcock tells us about reading James. A wide-range of approaches offer fresh insights about spectatorship, narrative structure, and cinematic representation, as well as the relationship between technology and art, the powers of silence, sensory-and sensational-experiences, the impact of cognition, and the uncertainty of interpretation. The essays explore the avowal and disavowal of familial bonds, as well as questions of Victorian convention, female agency, and male anxiety. And they fruitfully engage issues related to patriarchy, colonialism, national, transnational, and global identities. The capacious collection, with its brilliant insights and intellectual surprises, is equally compelling in its range and cogency for James readers and film theorists, for Hitchcock fans and James scholars. Cover Contents Preface Reading James with Hitchcock, Seeing Hitchcock through James 1. National Bodies 2. Secrets, Lies, and "Virtuous Attachments": The Ambassadors and The 39 Steps 3. Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock after the American Century: Circulation and Nonreturn in The American Scene and Strangers on a Train 4. Colonial Discourse and the Unheard Other in Washington Square and The Man Who Knew Too Much 5. Bump: Concussive Knowledge in James and Hitchcock 6. James's Birdcage/Hitchcock's Birds 7. Sounds of Silence in The Wings of the Dove and Blackmail 8. The Perfect Enigma. 9. Hands, Objects, and Love in James and Hitchcock: Reading the Touch in The Golden Bowl and Notorious10. The Touch of the Real: Circumscribing Vertigo 11. Specters of Respectability: Victorian Horrors in The Turn of the Screw and Psycho 12. Caged Heat: Feminist Rebellion in In the Cage and Rear Window 13. Shadows of Modernity: What Maisie Knew and Shadow of a Doubt 14. Awkward Ages: James and Hitchcock in Between Notes Works Cited Filmography Contributors Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z. Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock knew too much. Self-imposed exiles, they approached American and European society as inside-outsiders, a position that afforded them a kind of double vision. Masters of their arts, manipulators of their audiences, prescient and pathbreaking in their techniques, these demanding and meticulous craftsmen produced some of the greatest art of the last 150 years. This capacious collection, with its brilliant insights and intellectual surprises, is equally compelling in its range and cogency for James readers and film theorists, for Hitchcock fans and James scholars