One of the other projects last year was a graduate seminar on modernism, postmodernism, and the detective story, an updated version of a course I taught five years ago. Since some of the changes were suggested by long-ago commenters Stephen Frug, Peli Grietzer, and Rose Curtin I thought I might share the results here. The course was an absolute pleasure and the new additions--particularly the Borges, Nabokov, and Gibson--were some of the most challenging and rewarding classes I've taught in years.
Though I hope to top them this semester...
ENGG 243, Studies in American Modernism and Postmodernism. This course pairs some of the most influential and perceptive critical studies of modernism and postmodernism with a series of detective novels and films. As many scholars have noted, the detective story is one of the most perfect popular expressions of the modernist impulse to organize a chaotic world through heightened artistic perception. By examining how this genre intersects with the tenets of modernism, and how it is revised or altered by postmodernism, we will see how these two movements have structured our understanding of the modern world.
8/25 Introduction: Why mysteries?
9/1 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter”
Sean McCann, Gumshoe America pp. 6-15
9/8 Pauline Hopkins, Hagar’s Daughter
Stephen Soitos, The Blues Detective ch. 3, esp. 52-76
9/15 Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, “Modernity and modernism”
9/22 T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”
Martin Rowson, The Wasteland
9/29 Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
The Maltese Falcon, dir. John Huston
McCann, Gumshoe America pp. 88-91, 167-171
10/6 Film noir
Citizen Kane, dir. Orson Welles
Double Indemnity, dir. Billy Wilder
Paul Schrader, “Notes on Film Noir”
10/13 Jorge Luis Borges, “Death and the Compass” and “The Garden of Forking Paths”
Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, Detecting Texts, “The Game's Afoot: On the Trail of the Metaphysical Detective Story”
1o/20 Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, “From modernist to postmodernist fiction”
10/27 Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Joan Didion, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream”
11/3 Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey ch. 6
11/10 Chinatown, dir. Roman Polanski
John G. Cawelti, “Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films”
Fredric Jameson, “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” pp. 16-25
11/17 Paul Auster, Paul Karasik, and David Mazzuchelli, City of Glass
11/24 William Gibson, Neuromancer
Conference paper drafts due
12/1 Conference papers
12/8 Final papers due
This looks like an interesting class. I'm glad to see this blog come to life again.
Posted by: Adam Kaiserman | January 29, 2010 at 02:33 PM
I'm quite thrilled to see you blogging again.
Posted by: Stephen Frug | February 01, 2010 at 08:53 PM