| Detective Fictions |  |
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| This course is a critical participatory investigation of the signature ambivalences that inform detective fiction as a genre and condition its vicissitudes. We will focus on: the cognitive orientations of the narrative that vacillate between awe and hyperrationality; the subliminal/sublimated commonalities of the sleuth and the outlaw; the organic antagonism between the clues at the crime scene that evoke a world supersaturated with meaning and the detective's control and reduction of that excessive signification. We will study these elements first in the work of Edgar Allen Poe. Next we will trace their historicocultural transformations in the texts of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century France and Great Britain. We will then examine the emergence of the "Hard-Boiled" detective genre in the 1920s and 1930s in the U.S., which will lead to a consideration of the so-called "roman noir" of the 1950s. |  |
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| Our reading of the texts will progressively incorporate reflection on the modes of reading inscribed within the texts as well as the modes of reading that rigorous critical inquiry demand. We will distinguish among the subject of investigation, the object of investigation, and the mode of investigation. While the "subject" of investigation will be personified by the detective, the object will vary among categories that we will make precise: riddle, enigma, and mystery. The modes of reading will include decoding, interpretation, exegesis, and analysis. | ||||||
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Our examination of genre will be divided into two parts: The first part will focus on the "internal boundaries" of detective fiction. For example, our initial contrastive readings of Poe and Conan Doyle will provide inroads into some of the foundational contradictions of the detective story per se: the obsessive reliance on rationality on the one hand and the apprehension of the limits of rationality on the other; the puzzle to be solved without consequence as opposed to the mystery that encompasses the criminal and the criminologist. The second part of the course will focus on the external boundaries of the detective genre: in reading suspense fiction, we will pay particular attention to the differences between the epistemological constraints characterizing the two genres. |
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Lectures provide historical background and introductions to genre theory, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and cultural critique. The film screenings will provide another dimension for our joint speculative engagement with these cultural modalities of anxiety and fantasy, nihilism and faith. |
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