Topics in Literature and Culture (285-0-20)

Topic

Murder on the Bestseller List

Instructors

Adam Cody Syvertsen

Meeting Info

Parkes Hall 223: Mon, Wed 2:00PM - 3:20PM

Overview of class

From Serial to The White Lotus to Knives Out, our contemporary obsession with murder mysteries is everywhere. And yet, it didn't start with podcasts and blockbusters—ardent sleuths have been chasing homicide suspects across the pages of fiction for at least two centuries. During the genre's dawn in the mid-nineteenth century, murder and other forms of gothic violence were most often confined to remote haunted castles or the damp wilds of the English countryside. However, with the explosion of detective stories and crime fiction in the early twentieth century, these nightmares invaded the supposedly blissful, domestic consciousness of the emergent American middle class, and writers increasingly used skeptical detectives to ask dangerous questions about criminal justice practices: Whose deaths matter? Who is allowed to grieve? And can justice really be trusted to the institutions that claim to uphold it? Through reading foundational short stories by authors like Edgar Allan Poe and Pauline Hopkins (the first Black author of detective fiction), and the hard-boiled magazine mysteries of Raymond Chandler, this course will explore crime fiction from its origins as more than simply entertainment. We will engage with novels such as Patricia Highsmith's "Ripley" thrillers, and detective fiction set during the mid-century US civil rights movement written by Walter Mosley. Finally, we will conclude by turning to the present and examining contemporary "true" crime podcasts and popular mystery films—like Serial and Knives Out—to consider how these long-standing questions continue to shape (post)modern fiction and non-fiction storytelling. Ultimately, the course will challenge you to use literary history as a lens to interrogate the social conditions of our present: Who gets justice in 2026—and who doesn't?

Class Attributes

Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area

Enrollment Requirements

Enrollment Requirements: Pre-registration -- Reserved for English students.