Lectures on MW; discussions on F

Reading Mysteries

Spotlighting mystery novels and short stories, this course aims to make you a better reader of literature.

We will begin with classic mystery writers like Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, reading them alongside their surprising contemporaries (Did you know, for example, that before Doyle ever wrote a Sherlock Holmes story, a number of women writers had created female detectives in their fiction?). Similarly, we’ll read a few hardboiled masters (Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain) alongside Chester Himes, a black writer from Jefferson City whose work appeared alongside Chandler and Cain’s in crime magazines of the 1930s and 1940s. We’ll read Patricia Highsmith’s classic, The Talented Mr. Ripley, with an eye toward how it pioneered the psychological thriller—and paved the way for hundreds of other women writers, including Gone Girl’s Gillian Flynn, to take their turn at the genre. And we’ll close the course with a look at some of today’s most respected crime writers of color, such as Walter Mosley and Isabella Moldanado.

Although this is a lecture course where you will learn a great deal of literary and cultural history, we will spend a good portion of our time talking with each other about these books and the issues they raise. We will also spend a lot of time talking about how to read literature and develop your skills in analyzing voice, tone, structure, style, and other components of written texts. Key to this course is the question of why mysteries are so popular: What pleasures do they give us? Why are so many mystery writers women? What do mysteries reveal about the enjoyments and challenges of reading itself? And what do they tell us about the tensions and anxieties of different historical moments, including our own?

Please note: The honors section of English 1100 will read an additional novel during the course of the semester. Assignments, and several of the Friday discussions, will also differ from those of the regular sections.