Deciphering the City: The Urban Detective Story

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Same as ENGL 24492 , but with additional work. This course studies the Urban Detective Story as a genre uniquely attuned to the crime, policing, challenges, temptations and also pleasures and epiphanies of the modern metropolis. It argues that the birth of the modern detective story coincided with, and responded to, the new predominance of urban life in the nineteenth century, nowhere more so than in London. While the roots of the detective story can be traced all the way back to Oedipus Rex, it is in Edgar Allan Poe's Auguste Dupin stories and Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories that the detective story becomes as much about deciphering the city as it is about unmasking the murderer. We will examine the affiliations, connections, and correspondences between the detective story and metropolitan life, with a special focus on London crime and London policing. Classes will focus on close readings of the set texts, with an emphasis on the study of literature in its historical, cultural, and material contexts. The course will argue that as the city increased in complexity, density, and vastness, so too it became proportionally less knowable, fathomable or graspable, and the more strenuous the efforts of the Urban Detective Story to "solve" it, applying rigorous logic and a set of assumptions regarding the rationality of human behavior that were increasingly out of step with a deeply irrational world. Class discussions will likewise reconsider the often assumed equivalence between law and order and virtue, and between criminality, sin, and social transgression. We will reflect on the problematic role of the detective when society itself - or its esteemed representatives - transgresses against a higher moral law.