| CODE | LAS2008 | ||||||
| TITLE | The Detective and the City: From Dupin and Sherlock to Hannibal and Batman | ||||||
| UM LEVEL | H - Higher Level | ||||||
| MQF LEVEL | 6 | ||||||
| ECTS CREDITS | 4 | ||||||
| DEPARTMENT | Centre for the Liberal Arts and Sciences | ||||||
| DESCRIPTION | This unit provides an overview of the rise of 'the analytical detective story' as this was pioneered by Edgar Allan Poe and taken up by writers like Arthur Conan Doyle, and G. K. Chesterton. Central to the tradition of the whodunit, is the myth of the 'Great Detective', in figures like C. Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, and Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, and their relationship with the multifaceted city with all its mysteries, cultures, and secrets. The unit also introduces the hard-boiled tradition of crime stories as developed by writers like Raymond Chandler. The main focus of this Unit is given to the diversity of contemporary detective stories. These include the thriller of violence, such as Thomas Harris’ Hannibal novels, the postmodern neo-medievalism of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, Martin Amis’s black comedy, London Fields, as well as the Batman DC Comics among others. Several important television series, including BBC’s Sherlock and HBO’s True Detective, are also discussed. Throughout the unit, the thin dividing line between the canonical, the 'middlebrow' (Virginia Woolf's term) and the popular is kept in view, as well as the genre’s integration and interaction with other genres as seen especially in its recent developments. Learning Outcomes: 1. Knowledge & Understanding By the end of the unit the student will be able to: - appreciate some of the less commonly evident resonances of canonical literature; - grasp the breadth and eclecticism of different traditions of detective fiction; - acquire a sense of the pervasiveness of representations of the detective figure and the city trope in literature and culture; - discern the comparabilities and differences across different traditions of detective narrative; - acquire a sense of some of the contemporary mythologies that have grown from and around detective fiction, its origins, and its current trends. 2. Skills By the end of the unit the student will be able to: - conduct a simple exercise involving narratological analysis, on the basis of the study of the poetics of detective fiction; - compare different traditions of detective fiction, on bases of both range and detail; - analyse contemporary texts of the genre with a view to identifying concerns that go beyond issues involving theme, character and plot; - speak and write with some confidence on the permeability of canonical and popular literature to each other. Main Text/s and any supplementary readings: Apart from being directed to reading from studies like the ones below (and others for which details will be provided at the start of the unit), students will be given a reading pack containing significant essay-length commentaries on different aspects of crime fiction. - Bell, Ian A., and Graham Daldry, eds, Watching the Detectives: Essays on Crime Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1990). - Benstock, Bernard, ed., Essays on Detective Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1983). - Black, Joel, The Aesthetics of Murder: A Study in Romantic Literature and Contemporary Culture (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). - Docherty, Brian, ed., American Crime Fiction: Studies in the Genre (London: Macmillan, 1988). - Eco, Umberto, and Thomas A. Sebeok, The Sign of Three (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). - Fleming, Stuart J., Authenticity in Art: The Scientific Detection of Forgery (London: Institute of Physics, 1975). - Frank, Lawrence, Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence (London: Palgrave, 2003). - Hilfer, Tony, The Crime Novel: A Deviant Genre (Austin; University of Texas Press, 1990). - Irwin, John T., The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). - Kayman, Martin A., From Bow Street to Baker Street: Mystery, Detection and Narrative (London: Macmillan, 1992). - Knight, Stephen, Form and Ideology in Detective Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1980). - Mann, Jessica, Deadlier than the Male: An Investigation into Feminine Crime Writing (Newton Abbot : David & Charles, 1981). - Marchino, Lois, and Deane Mansfield-Kelley, Longman Anthology of Detective Fiction (London: Longman, 2004). - Merivale, Patricia, and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). - Messent, Peter, Criminal Proceedings: The Contemporary American Crime Novel (London: Pluto, 1997). - Ousby, Ian, Bloodhounds of Heaven: The Detective in English Fiction from Godwin to Doyle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). - Porter, Dennis, The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction (Yale University Press, 1981). - Priestman, Martin, Detective Fiction and Literature: The Figure on the Carpet (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991). - Routley, Eric, The Puritan Pleasures of the Detective Story (London: Gollancz, 1972). - Rosenheim, Shawn James, The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Poe to the Internet (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). - Rzepka, Charles J., Detective Fiction (London: Polity, 2005). - Symons, Julian, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History (London: Faber, 1972). - Yale French Studies, 108 (2005). - Walton, Priscilla L., and Manina Jones, Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). - Winks, Robin W., ed., Detective Fiction : A Collection of Critical Essays (London: Prentice-Hall, 1980). - Worthington, Heather, The Rise of the Detective in Early Nineteeth-Century Popular Fiction (London: Palgrave, 2005). |
||||||
| ADDITIONAL NOTES | Pre-requisite Qualifications: Intermediate Level in English (or equivalent) | ||||||
| STUDY-UNIT TYPE | Lecture | ||||||
| METHOD OF ASSESSMENT |
|
||||||
| LECTURER/S | Ivan Callus (Co-ord.) David Vella |
||||||
|
The University makes every effort to ensure that the published Courses Plans, Programmes of Study and Study-Unit information are complete and up-to-date at the time of publication. The University reserves the right to make changes in case errors are detected after publication.
The availability of optional units may be subject to timetabling constraints. Units not attracting a sufficient number of registrations may be withdrawn without notice. It should be noted that all the information in the description above applies to study-units available during the academic year 2023/4. It may be subject to change in subsequent years. |
|||||||