Introduction to Detective Fiction
ENGL 257
Spring 2025
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01
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This seminar introduces two intertwined genres: detective fiction and crime fiction. Surveying a range of British, American, as well as postcolonial writers from Kenya and India, we'll explore how novelists and short story writers imagined the operations (and failures) of law, justice, and truth in different historical moments, and towards different ends. We'll learn some techniques for analyzing detective fiction--from its form, to its format in early periodicals, to its social and historical and political subtexts. We will pay particular attention to the ways of knowing the genre enables--from the early colonial detective fictions and constructions of race to the later-day crime fiction that uses the genre to stage problems of adjudicating and redressing imperial harms. Along the way, we'll use these at-times pulpy mysteries to think through the status of genre fiction in the university canon and the relationship of art, entertainment, and commodity. |
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
HA ENGL |
| Course Format: Discussion | Grading Mode: Graded |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Requirement for: None |
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Past Enrollment Probability: 50% - 74% |
| SECTION 01 |
Major Readings: Wesleyan RJ Julia Bookstore
May include Wilkie Collins THE MOONSTONE; Arthur Conan Doyle, A STUDY IN SCARLET, Agatha Christie, THE MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR AT STYLES; Ng¿g¿ wa Thiong'o, PETALS OF BLOOD; short fiction by Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Fortune, Jorge Louis Borges, and Gerald Griffin
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Examinations and Assignments:
2 papers, reading responses
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Additional Requirements and/or Comments:
Contributes to the following English major requirements:
Literary History 2, British Literature |
| Instructor(s): Eckert,Sierra Times: ..T.R.. 08:50AM-10:10AM; Location: FISK210; |
| Total Enrollment Limit: 19 | | SR major: 3 | JR major: 4 | | |
| Seats Available: 0 | GRAD: X | SR non-major: 0 | JR non-major: 2 | SO: 5 | FR: 5 |
| Drop/Add Enrollment Requests | | | | | |
| Total Submitted Requests: 8 | 1st Ranked: 1 | 2nd Ranked: 2 | 3rd Ranked: 3 | 4th Ranked: 2 | Unranked: 0 |
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