TOWSON UNIVERSITY, Cultural Studies and English.
Course tutor: Deborah Shaller, English Dept., Towson University, Towson, Maryland USA.
CLST 305/ENG. 473
Textual Baltimore: Crime Stories and the Imagined City
Course Description: Two of the acknowledged progenitors of the crime story--Edgar Allan Poe and Dashiell Hammet--both walked Baltimore streets. More recently, Baltimore writer David Simon has created what many critics suggest is a signal turn in television detective drama: with "Homicide: Life on the Street," "The Corner," and "The Wire," Simon and the city itself have come to embody a new aesthetic of crime and a particular form of cultural engagement. To begin to understand the intersections of city and text, we will explore a variety of contexts: the literary development of the detective story; the nature of the "popular" text; relationships between the modern city and the figure of the detective; the selling of crime and criminals; and the emerging imaginary of Baltimore, a city known increasingly for both its homicide rate and its ability to transform those events into art. We read Dashiell Hammet's The Continental Op, Laura Lippman's Baltimore Blues; t.p. luce's Tha Bloc; David Simon's Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets; Simon and Burns', The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner City Neighborhood; and Louise Titchener's Burned in Baltimore.
American Crime Stories
Course tutor: Michelle Glaros
Course description: In this course students will study an exciting period in American fiction. From the 1930s to the 1950s, American readers witnessed the rise of a popular genre: Noir or hard boiled fiction. Several factors contributed to the rise of this form of fiction including the proliferation of pulp magazines, so named because of the course paper on which they were printed. The novels we will study in this class were written by the most notable and prolific noir writers. In addition, we will take a close look at a related art form: film noir. Mostly B films, film noir represents the celluloid equivalent of hard boiled fiction in more than just technical ways. Many hard boiled fiction writers found themselves on Hollywood payrolls for a time during their colorful lives.
Texts:
The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammet
Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 1940s
Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s
American Crime Stories Course Pack
http://courses.dsu.edu/glarosm/CrimeStories/syllabus.htm~
PACE UNIVERSITY (New York State) ~ American Detective Fiction
Course description:
This course will survey the development of American crime fiction with particular attention to the figure of the detective as a focus of social values. Students will become familiar with:
* The foundational work of Poe.
* The development of the hard-boiled school in writers such as Hammett and Chandler.
* The diversification of the genre's concerns in writers such as Rudolph Fisher, Ishmael Reed and Thomas Harris.
The goals of the American Detective Fiction course are:
To help students become better readers and better writers, even as they develop an in-depth understanding of the growth and development of a peculiarly American genre.
http://support.csis.pace.edu/nactel/Registration/IndividualCourseDescription.cfm?C=LIT196N
DAKOTA
STATE UNIVERSITY