Literature and Culture: The Private Detective Fiction and Film

Catalog description

This course will bring history, cultural studies, and literary and film studies to bear on a reading of the image of the private detective as that image has evolved over time in fiction and film. Starting with texts that present the detective as ratiocinative genius (most famously in the figure of Sherlock Holmes), we will work through the shift to a grittier, more working class version of the detective in hard boiled fiction and its filmic adaptations, through novels and movies that later turn the detective figure to political use by inserting the image of the detective into histories of race, or by revising the gender politics of the genre of detective fiction, to works that represent the detective as exemplary postmodern subject, awash in information. Through all these shifts we will be examining the relations between texts and contexts (in history and culture), situating the rise of the detective figure in fiction, for example, within the crisis of modernity (rapid industrialization, urbanization, collapsing social structures, and so on).