First-Year Research Seminar: Watching the Detectives: Detective Fiction and The Problems of…

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Detective fiction can appear as a somewhat slight entertainment: the whodunnit is often understood as a popular genre in which a detective figure is confronted with a crime and solves it by the end of the story, through careful attention to detail and logical reasoning, and to the reader's satisfaction. In this course, however, we'll follow a number of different fictional detectives from various times and places to discover that this genre is much more than that. In the structure of the standard detective story, the literary critic Peter Brooks saw a template for all narrative forms. Writing of Euro-American detective fiction of the nineteenth century, Franco Moretti sees detective stories as expressive of cultural anxiety about a rapidly expanding society and argues that they function to reassure readers that society is still a unitary and knowable body. With its beginnings in the Anglo-American nineteenth century, detective fiction can be seen to privilege a hegemonic Western mode of knowing, committed to reason and the methods of science. But the genre has proven quite flexible: writers from all over the world have taken it up, writing novels and stories that explore the position of the cultural and social outsider and using the classic detective model against itself to question dominant ways of knowing. In so doing, detective fiction raises questions about how gender, class, race, and empire shape how we know what we know and where strategies for knowing find their limits. Well read classic detective fiction from Poe to Conan Doyle to Christie and Chesterton; but we'll also look at the way writers like Jorge-Luis Borges, Dorothy Sayers, Walter Moseley, Suki Kim, Vikram Chandra and others have used the genre to question broad abstract claims about knowledge in the light of local, specific modes of knowing. All the while, we'll work on building and reflecting on--…