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21L.310 Bestsellers: Detective Fiction
Fall 2006
Poster for a theatrical adaptation of Sherlock Holmes (1900). (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number: LC-USZC2-1459 (color film copy slide)].)Course Highlights
This course features an extensive list of readings.
Course Description
This course focuses on works that caught the popular imagination in the past or present. It emphasizes texts that are related by genre, theme or style. The books studied in this course vary from semester to semester, and the topic for Fall 2006 is Detective Fictions.
Syllabus
Overview
This course consists of readings in the history of the form of the detective story, from the 19th-century to the present. It involves studies in questions of knowing, from materialist puzzles through metaphysical meditations to elegant whimsy, from murder in an English country village to crowned jewels buried in a footnote.
Attendance
Because we'll do much of the work of this subject through discussions, naturally I'll expect you to be actively here during class and to practice the skills of a good participant: informed attention, preparation, helpful contribution, talking, assimilation, generous and intelligent listening, and mutual respect.
Readings
Do all the readings. We'll have quizzes every week or so. Results of those quizzes account for ca. 25% of the final grade.
Quizzes and Exam
Frequent quizzes; short final exercise.
Grades
| ACTIVITIES | WEIGHTS |
|---|---|
| In class work, including seminar skills | 2/3 |
| Written work, quizzes, and exam | 1/3 |
Calendar
| Lec # | Topics |
|---|---|
| 1 | High Art, Hermenutics, Detection, and Suspense Modes: Oedipus and Theseus Typology: The Hidden Treasure, The Locked Room, the Detective-as-Suspect |
| 2 | Nature and Hieroglyphics Ideograms Cryptography as Process and as Metaphor |
| 3 | Doubling Self-Consciousness as Method and Disguise Materialism, Claustrophobic Homes, Locked Rooms |
| 4 | Materialism and Identity The Advantages of Empiricism are the Disadvantages of Empiricism Why Conan Doyle Killed Off Holmes to Write about Victorian Faeries |
| 5 | Self and Self-Revelation Oedipal Resistances Retrospective Narratives |
| 6 | The Position of the Observer Small Town, Country House, Sexual Demimonde, Moving Train |
| 7 | McGuffins, Clewes, Histories The Detective as Knight Errant Film Noir as Style and as Moral Orientation |
| 8 | Deep Focus Politics and Representation Does Rosebud Even Matter? Kane's Women |
| 9 | Doubling and the Mind-Body Nexus Completing Dupin The Double-Mirror Paradigm of Self-Consciousness Evidence, Clues, Solution: Elusive Pleasures |
| 10 | Guilt and Transference The Pleasure of Looking through Other People's Windows The Secret in the Marsh: Coming Clean about Secrets |
| 11 | The Hidden Jewels Doubling and Narcissism "The Mystery to a Solution" |
Readings
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This section contains the readings for the course, which are also presented by session.
Books
Doyle, Arthur Conan. Six Great Sherlock Holmes Stories. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1992. ISBN: 0486270556.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1999. ISBN: 0679723420.
Poe, Edgar Allen. Tales of Terror and Detection. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1995. ISBN: 0486287440.
Cain, James M. The Postman Always Rings Twice. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1989. ISBN: 0679723250.
Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Falcon. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1989. ISBN: 0679722645.
Christie, Agatha. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. New York, NY: Berkley Publishing, 2004. ISBN: 0425200477.
Weber, K. J. Five Minute Mysteries. Philadelphia, PA: Running Press, 1989. ISBN: 0894716905.
Sobol, D. J. Two Minute Mysteries. New York, NY: Scholastic, 1991. ISBN: 0590447874.
Browning, Robert. My Last Duchess and Other Poems. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1993. ISBN: 0486277836.
Sophocles. Oedipus Rex. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1991. ISBN: 0486268772.
Readings by Session
| LEC # | Topics | READINGS |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | High Art, Hermenutics, Detection, and Suspense Modes: Oedipus and Theseus Typology: The Hidden Treasure, The Locked Room, the Detective-as-Suspect | Sophocles. Oedipus Rex. Film: The Moonstone. Directed by Paddy Russell. 1972. |
| 2 | Nature and Hieroglyphics Ideograms Cryptography as Process and as Metaphor | Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Nature." (Read the essay, not the entire work.) Poe, Edgar Allen. "The Raven." In Tales of Terror and Detection. Ancillary Readings Haycraft, Howard. Murder for Pleasure. New York, NY: Appleton-Century Company, 1941. |
| 3 | Doubling Self-Consciousness as Method and Disguise Materialism, Claustrophobic Homes, Locked Rooms | Poe, Edgar Allen. "Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Purloined Letter," "The Raven," and "The Philosophy of Composition." In Tales of Terror and Detection. Ancillary Readings Lacan, Jacques. "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter.'" Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman. Yale French Studies 48, French Freud: Structural Studies in Psychoanalysis (1972): 5-9. |
| 4 | Materialism and Identity The Advantages of Empiricism are the Disadvantages of Empiricism Why Conan Doyle Killed Off Holmes to Write about Victorian Faeries | Doyle, Arthur Conan. "A Scandal in Bohemia," "Adventure of the Speckled Band," "Adventure of the Dancing Men," "Five Orange Pips," "The Musgrave Ritual," and "The Final Problem." In Six Great Sherlock Holmes Stories. |
| 5 | Self and Self-Revelation Oedipal Resistances Retrospective Narratives | Browning, Robert. "The Bishop orders His Tomb," "My Last Duchess," "Porphyria's Lover," "Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister." In My Last Duchess and Other Poems. Ancillary Readings Porter, Dennis. "Backward Construction and the Art of Suspense." In Pursuit of Crime. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981. ISBN: 0300027222. |
| 6 | The Position of the Observer Small Town, Country House, Sexual Demimonde, Moving Train | Christie, Agatha. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Ancillary Readings Wilson, Edmund. "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" Originally published in New Yorker, January 20, 1945. Grossvogel, David. "Agatha Christie: Containment of the Unknown." In Mystery and Its Fictions: From Oedipus to Agatha Christie. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. ISBN: 0801822017. |
| 7 | McGuffins, Clewes, Histories The Detective as Knight Errant Film Noir as Style and as Moral Orientation | Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Falcon. Film: The Maltese Falcon. Directed by John Huston. 1941. Ancillary Readings Chandler, Raymond. "The Simple Art of Murder." Originally published in Atlantic Monthly, December, 1945. |
| 8 | Deep Focus Politics and Representation Does Rosebud Even Matter? Kane's Women | Film: Citizen Kane. Directed by Orson Welles. 1941. Ancillary Readings Stowe, William. "From Semiotics to Hermeneutics: Modes of Detection in Doyle and Chandler." In Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory. Edited by Glenn Most and William Stowe. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1983, pp. 366-84. ISBN: 0156723123. |
| 9 | Doubling and the Mind-Body Nexus Completing Dupin The Double-Mirror Paradigm of Self-Consciousness Evidence, Clues, Solution: Elusive Pleasures | Borges, Jorge Luis. "The Garden of Forking Paths," "Death and the Compass," and "Ibn Hakkam al-Bokhari, Dead in his Labyrinth." In Collected Fictions. Translated by Andrew Hurley. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1999. ISBN: 0140286802. ———. "Kafka and His Precursors." In Labyrinths: Selected Short Stories and Other Writings. New York, NY: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1964. ISBN: 0811200124. |
| 10 | Guilt and Transference The Pleasure of Looking through Other People's Windows The Secret in the Marsh: Coming Clean about Secrets | Film: Psycho. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. 1960. Ancillary Readings Barthes, Roland. "Delay and the Hermeneutic Sentence." In Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory. Edited by Glenn Most and William Stowe. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1983. ISBN: 0156723123. Also published in: Barthes, Roland. "Sarrasine, by Honoré de Balzac." In Appendices of S/Z: An Essay. Translated by Richard Miller. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1974. ISBN: 0374521670. |
| 11 | The Hidden Jewels Doubling and Narcissism "The Mystery to a Solution" | Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. |
Assignments
Students are required to complete the following assignments during the course.
Theories
At times you choose during the term, write a brief (probably 2-3 page) summary of each of 3 of the "ancillary essays" assigned in relation to major readings. The point of the summary is clarification through repetition; just summarize. Do these exercises at your own pace throughout the term; give them to me in hard-copy.
Short Essays
Occasionally we'll also do 'quick shot' essays. When a class discussion leads to a critical crux, a crossroads, or a need for clarity, we'll collectively set a question near the end of a class period, toward a short (approximately 2 page) essay for the next class.
A Mystery
Near midterm we'll aggregate what we've learned about "classic" forms of detective-fiction. Each student will write a short (approximately 6 page) form in one of the "classic" modes (country-house, materialist-detection, police procedural, etc.). Submit the story's solution to the instructor (final scene, missing information, last page, whatever) and update the rest on-line. We'll work through them in class to see what we can learn about expectations, thematics, stylistics, assumptions, and strategies of the different modes.
A Discovery
Discover a writer or genre we haven't discussed, or haven't discussed much, in class. Read a few examples. Write an essay that lays out the facts, interprets or otherwise explains why the mode or the narrative or the detective matters. You may want to locate the new material in the context of other work(s) we've discussed. (e.g., Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins stories update noir and 'hardboiled' techniques, with an African-American detective/narrator in LA in the late 1940s.)
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