Leitch, Thomas M. 1964-

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LEITCH, Thomas M. 1964-

PERSONAL:

Born June 18, 1964, in Orange, NJ; married 1977; children: two. Education: Columbia College, B.A., 1972; Yale University, Ph.D., 1976.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of English, University of Delaware, 212 Memorial Hall, Newark, DE 19716-2799. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Yale University, New Haven, CT, assistant professor of English, 1976-83; University of Delaware, Newark, associate professor, 1983-91, professor of English, 1994—, and director of film studies major. Kirkus Reviews, senior editor of mystery fiction and critic, beginning 1989; Rolling Stone, author of "Digital Beat" column, beginning 1989; contributing editor to Spin and IEEE Spectrum.

MEMBER:

Modern Language Association, Society for Cinema Studies, Literature/Film Association, Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Senior Fulbright lectureship, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1989-90.

WRITINGS:

What Stories Are: Narrative Theory and Interpretation, Pennsylvania State University Press (University Park, PA), 1986.

Find the Director, and Other Hitchcock Games, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1991.

Lionel Trilling: An Annotated Bibliography, Garland (New York, NY), 1993.

The Encyclopedia of Alfred Hitchcock, Facts on File, (New York, NY), 2002.

Crime Films, Cambridge University Press, (New York, NY), 2002.

SIDELIGHTS:

Film scholar and writer Thomas M. Leitch is the author of several books, among them What Stories Are: Narrative Theory and Interpretation, Lionel Trilling: An Annotated Bibliography, and Crime Films. In addition, Leitch has taught English at the University of Delaware since 1983, and is director of the film studies concentration there.

Published in 1986, Leitch's What Stories Are discusses the author's view of what constitutes a story, as well as what does not. Dividing his argument—and the book—into two sections: "Narrative Ontology" and "Narrative Tropes." According to Leitch, a story is successful when it "engages the audience's narrativity," narrativity in this case comprising the "ability to defer one's gratification; the ability to supply connectives among the material a story presents; and the ability to perceive events as significantly related to the point of a given story or sequence." In "Narrative Ontology" Leitch discusses the principles behind stories and how they shape everything from novels and works of short fiction to films and television soap operas, while "Narrative Ontology" presents readers with a set of rules that Leitch argues govern successful storytelling. In a review for the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Walter R. Fisher called What Stories Are "a worthy contribution to the ongoing conversation about narrative," while Modern Language Review critic Jo Labanyi noted that Leitch's "argument is tight" and his analysis of texts "often illuminating" despite a somewhat ambiguous conclusion.

Geared for the general reader as well as film afficionados, Leitch's The Encyclopedia of Alfred Hitchcock provides a comprehensive guide to the profusion of commentary on the famous and well-loved British director. Beginning with a brief biography of Hitchcock, the encyclopedia includes over 1,200 entries of varying length. Leitch places Hitchcock's individual works within the context of his long and successful career, and includes everything from Hitchcock's major films to the small projects he participated in, such as the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. In addition information is included in each discussion regarding individual projects' primary cast members, crew, production companies, and filmmaking techniques or themes. Marilyn Rosenthal, reviewing the work for the Library Journal, highly recommended The Encyclopedia of Alfred Hitchcock as "a scholarly yet accessible addition to film collections." Also focusing on Hitchcock is Find the Director, and Other Hitchcock Games, which focuses on the director's efforts toward self-promotion during the 1960s; reviewing the work for Film Quarterly Paul Thomas noted that Leitch "has a good eye and shows a rare and altogether welcome familiarity with the literary sources of Hitchcock's films."

Crime Films also showcases Leitch's expansive knowledge in the area of film. Here he discusses what he terms "The Problem of the Crime Film." Focusing on the twentieth century, Leitch zeros in on ten choice films he considers representative of the crime-film genre, and traces the roles of three characteristic figures that appear in these works and, by extension, the entire genre: the criminal, the victim, and the avenger. Leitch notes the continued blurring between these three roles throughout the twentieth century, and argues that this blurring is a reflection of the growing social ambivalence regarding crime and its constituents. Discussing such films as Frances Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Leitch notes that big-budget as well as smaller, independent films show this same cultural evolution. J. M. Welsh, reviewing Crime Films for Choice, concluded that "No film critic writes more clearly, in a style unencumbered by jargon. Even the photo captions are unusually perceptive and amusing."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Canadian Literature, autumn, 2001, Roger Seamon, review of What Stories Are: Narrative Theory and Interpretation, p. 159.

Choice, November, 2002, p. 442; April, 2003, J. M. Welsh, review of Crime Films, p. 1371.

Film Quarterly, fall, 1995, Paul Thomas, review of Find the Director, and Other Hitchcock Games, pp. 35-36.

Library Journal, June 1, 1991, Robert Rayher, review of Find the Director, and Other Hitchcock Games, p. 142; July, 2002, Marilyn Rosenthal, review of The Encyclopedia of Alfred Hitchcock, p. 70.

Modern Fiction Studies, autumn, 1987, Suresh Raval, review of What Stories Are, p. 569.

Modern Language Review, July, 1992, Jo Labanyi, review of What Stories Are, p. 682.

Publishers Weekly, February 18, 2002, review of The Encyclopedia of Alfred Hitchcock, p. 92.

Quarterly Journal of Speech, August, 1988, Walter R. Fisher, review of What Stories Are, p. 400.