Detective Fiction/Film Noir

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This co-taught literature and film course rigorously investigates the intertwined evolution of two crucial modern art forms: American hard-boiled detective fiction and film noir. In the early twentieth century, a new American literary genre emerged out of the promise and threat of city streets and the social estrangement of the men and women who walked down them. This “gals, guts, and guns” school of detective fiction--otherwise known as “hard-boiled”—investigated more than who killed Colonel Mustard in the library with a knife. It interrogated the promise of America and its failures. Beginning with its origins in the 1840s with Edgar Allan Poe’s three subversive August Dupin stories, the literature part of this course will trace the evolution of this distinctly American literary genre. And no art form rages against the machine more violently than film noir with its dark frames and even darker lives. Taking shape and definition in the late 1930s and 1940s, and continuing through the 1950s, one benighted character after another struggles to make sense of the world-- sometimes failing at the effort. Such failures could be chalked up to many things. But most alarming among the possibilities was the thought that the world might be intractable, that you can never figure out how it works, what makes it tick. Not unlike the hard-boiled detective’s intuition that a story doesn’t add up, noir’s sensibility was an attitude, a mood, a language, a critique, and aesthetic of alienation where cynicism was part of a moral code and fatalism a part of democratic faith expressed, developed, and tested at the margins of legitimate cultural discourse. We shall explore how noir dramatized specific wartime and postwar American traumas about citizenship, gender relations, the reintegration of millions of soldiers into a peacetime society, abundance, corruption, and the fear of enemies from abroad and within. Along the way, we will study some of the most provocative and lasting literature and film America has produced. Readings and films will include: Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity, Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place, Chester Himes’s Cotton Comes to Harlem, William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley, Daniel Mainwaring’s Out of the Past, W. R. Burnett’s The Asphalt Jungle, Mickey Spillane’s Kiss Me Deadly.