The Trouble with Crime Fiction

3.0 credits · Undergraduate

Crime fiction simply dominates our screen time: White Lotus, Law and Order, NCIS, Psych, Sherlock, Only Murders in the Building, True Detective, Breaking Bad. But crime fiction is rife with trouble-femme fatales, drug-addled sleuths, random murders concealing menacing conspiracies. And literary culture loves to make trouble for crime fiction as well-to attack, parody, reinvent, complicate, and rejoice in it. This course will explore classic mystery story design in Poe, Doyle, and Wilkie Collins, and later fiction by Jorge Luis Borges, Joan Lindsay, Patricia Highsmith, Margaret Atwood, China Mieville, Tana French, Oyinkan Braithwaite, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia. We'll also analyze films and television episodes directed by Boon Joon-ho, Sally Wainwright, and Spike Lee.