Course details
Name: ENGL - 250
Title: MYSTERY AND CRIME FICTION
Section: 01
Semester: Fall - 2024
Credits: 3
Description:
This new MSU course addresses mystery and crime fiction, one of the richest and most influential modes of popular storytelling across the globe. We’ll begin with the origins of the form in the 19th-century, but much of our time will be spent with American "hard boiled" and "noir" crime fiction from the 1920s to the 1960s, including works by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Dorothy B. Hughes, David Goodis, and Chester Himes. We'll also look at other important forms of American crime fiction, including the mid-century domestic thriller with Elizabeth Sanxay Holding, the police procedural with Chester Himes, and a feminist response to our cultural obsession with serial killers with a recent novel by Ivy Pochoda. Along the way, we’ll attend to several important issues, including the influence of mystery and crime fiction on Hollywood noir filmmaking and vice-versa, and how crime stories across the last century has addressed issues of political and social corruption, racial injustice, the role of the police and the legal system, and violence against women.
Schedule: Tuesday,Friday From 12:45 pm To 2:00 pm
Graduation requirements:
- Any Literature (1e)
- Genre Study (Fiction)
- Other American (TE 1d)
- Post-1900 (1d)
- Women and Gender Studies (3c)
Teaching Faculty: Behlman Lee (behlmanl)
Is course canceled: No