Literature and Culture: Crimes and Misdemeanors

Catalog description

This interdisciplinary course examines the idea of criminality in American literature and film. Using a number of text that explore the ambiguities of criminality and legality, we will encounter characters who take pleasure in other's pain, some who are heroic in their law breaking, and others whose lawlessness disrupts the judgments of a serious world. In particular, we will explore the ways in which race, gender, class and ethnicity shade and shadow our understanding of whats right, what's just, and/or what's legal. The coursewill address the centrality of radical individualism as represented on a spectrum of bad behavior: from serial murders to playful mayhem. We will draw on a range of genres as well, from the gangster picture and the western, to short fiction and comic sketches. Our texts will include the foundational philosophy of Henry David Thoreau and Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Declaration of Sentiments, the psychological horror and crime fiction of Henry James, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Susan Glaspell, and Herman Melville; and the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, and Roman Polanski.