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09/04 - 12/20 | ||||||
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Subject: English (UG) (ENGL)
CRN: 42682
Lecture
St Paul: O'Shaughnessy Education Center 210
Old Core Requirements Met:
UG Core Literature/Writing
2020 Core Requirements Met:
Integ/Humanities
Other Requirements Met:
Writing Intensive
From its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century, mystery fiction has been a highly formulaic genre. Add a dead body, sprinkle in a handful of usual suspects, provide a quirky detective/police officer to solve the case, occasionally mix in a guilty butler, and you have a proven formula for a potential best-seller. However, a close examination of mystery fiction reveals that there’s more than meets the (private) eye. The authors in this genre often have their fingers on the pulse of the society from which they come, as their texts reflect and critique notions of race, class, gender, social institutions, and more. Additionally, the genre has expanded from the locked-room format employed by writers such as Conan Doyle and Christie and the shady back alleys employed by hard-boiled writers like Hammett and Chandler to focus on things like international politics and espionage, featured in the works of writers like le Carre. Throughout the semester, we’ll examine a handful of texts from the perspective of how these fit with the mystery fiction genre and what these texts have to say about the world they come from, and possibly our own world. The writing load for this course is a minimum of 15 pages of formal revised writing. This course satisfies the WAC Writing Intensive requirement.
4 Credits