Foreword (to: "Forever noir. Practices, metaphors, fractals". Special issue of "Linguae &" 2/2017)

This issue of Linguæ & collects a number of essays which contribute to the above-mentioned debate from different perspectives, offering original and innovative interpretations of the noir. Rebecca Martin opens the volume by investigating the too often neglected connections between French poetic realism of the 1930s and American noir, followed by Luca Ambrogiani who goes back to the aestheticizing practices of the ‘Yellow Nineties’. Giulio Segato chooses the symbolic universe of animals in James M. Cain’s fiction, while Stephen Knight lets us have a (long) glimpse into the fascinating Australian noir. Gian Italo Bischi and Giovanni Darconza try a comparison between the evolution of Mathematics and the novel in the twentieth-century novel by analysing how chaos and complexity interface with thrillers and crime novels. Finally, Margareth Amatulli re-reads Hitchcock’s masterpiece Rear Window through one of its best and stimulating re-elaborations, thus opening new paths of research among the many lives of the noir. In spite of their diversity, each essay testifies, in its own way, to the fertility and cross-fertilisation of the noir both in place and time. If, on the one hand, we look increasingly backward in order to find its real roots, on the other we want to acknowledge its legacy in our own time and even project it towards the future. The noir’s resistance and flexibility account both for its (literary, cultural, filmic) enduring practices and its never aging metaphors; with respect to its powerful rendering of social/individual disturbances and disquietedness, only fractal geometry can be as exhaustive.