COMP 401
Senior Seminar: Detective Fiction Fall 2013
Division I
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Class Details

Despite the genre’s comparative youth, detective fiction has proven unusually adaptable and stunningly prolific. In the less than 200 years since its inception, detective fiction has traveled to virtually every region of the globe and into countless languages, found a home in both high art and popular culture, penetrated media including print, cinema, the internet, and the iPhone app, and spawned subgenres as sundry and specific as the police procedural, cooking detective fiction, medieval monk detective fiction, and lesbian detective fiction. This seminar seeks to understand the genre’s explosion in the wake of Edgar Allan Poe’s seminal stories by surveying the diverse material that falls within its capacious generic boundaries, as well as work by those who theorize detective fiction. In addition to reading classics by Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie, we will explore texts that use the detective and the activity of detection in innovative ways (for example, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment), watch several works of film noir, and see what happens when the detective gets self-consciously conceptual in works by writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Paul Auster. All readings will be in English; however, students able to read translated works in the original language are encouraged to do so.
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 19
Expected: 10-12
Class#: 1932
Grading: no pass/fail option, no fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: active participation in class discussions, occasional short writing assignments and presentations in class, a final research paper
Extra Info: may not be taken on a pass/fail basis; not available for the Gaudino option
Prerequisites: a 300-level literature course or permission of the instructor
Enrollment Preferences: senior majors in Comparative Literature
Distributions: Division I

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