Global Noir

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

As its very name suggests, noir has always been a polyglot and traveling genre. Its dark cosmopolitanism is remarkable, considering that the genre is so grounded in particularities like location, local speech, local law, and local procedure. While the roots of the genre go back many decades to pulp print and mass cinema, never before has the genre been so ubiquitous, and so polyglot. From Pépé le Moko to Blade Runner to Dexter, from John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow to Haruki Murakami’s Hardboiled Wonderland to Stieg Larsson’s blockbuster Millenium trilogy, noir permeates pop culture around the globe. This course surveys classic and contemporary works of noir fiction and film in a broad range of languages and national canons. The main theoretical issues we will cover are problems of genre, narrative and language, as well as questions of urban literature, aesthetics and the commercial market, morality and crime.