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 19th-century British "golden age" mystery stories by figures such as Arthur Conan Doyle and L. T. (Elizabeth Thomasina) Meade, but most of our time will be spent with American crime fiction of the “hard boiled” genre from the 1920s to the 1960s, including works by Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon), Raymond Chandler (The Long Goodbye), Dorothy B. Hughes (In a Lonely Place), Elizabeth Sanxay Holding (The Blank Wall), David Goodis (Shoot the Piano Player or Down There), and Chester Himes (Cotton Comes to Harlem). The course will end with a work of contemporary noir fiction. We’ll attend to the influence of mystery and crime fiction on Hollywood noir filmmaking and vice-versa, and we’ll explore how crime stories address issues of political corruption, social injustice, and racial and gendered violence. Written assignments will include one short in-class essay, two medium-length essays, and a few short assignments.
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