Research-oriented and designed for upper-division English majors. Intensive examination of critical approaches, literary theory, or a special topic in literary and cultural studies. Topics vary from semester to semester. Students should consult the department's "Announcement of Classes" for offerings well before the beginning of the semester.

Crime, sex and rebellion define American popular art and film noir emerged as its unlikely apotheosis. Though noir's roots extend back to Poe and Collins, it was a handful of "hard-boiled" writers in the first half of the Twentieth Century -- Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, W.R. Burnett, Jim Thompson -- who created the dark world of tough loners and femmes fatales. Bring to their intricately plotted novels some innovative directors, including Robert Siodmak, Alfred Hitchcock, Jacques Tourneur, John Huston, Billy Wilder, and Orson Welles, add the lights and darks and sharp angles of German Expressionism, and you get classic film noir of the forties and fifties: Out of the Past, The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, Detour, Shadow of a Doubt, On Dangerous Ground, The Killers, Touch of Evil. Long after the era of classic noir ended, writers and filmmakers went on experimenting with the form, mixing it with other genres, and, by revivifying it, producing Chinatown, Le Samourai, Blue Velvet, Blade Runner, Jackie Brown, The Big Lebowski and The Man Who Wasn’t There. In this seminar we will screen the classics of noir and neo-noir and read their "hard-boiled" sources. As we sort out this potent mix of crime, sex, betrayal and existential dread, we will seek to understand how this most American of literary and popular arts came to be -- and why it still flourishes.

Requisites

• English 100 is prerequisite to English 190.

Repeat Rules