Topics will vary from semester to semester. Additional screening time may be required for film topics. See departmental announcement for offerings.

The Anglo-American tradition of crime and courtroom fiction and drama may well have roots in Scandinavian stories of murder, mayhem, and rough justice, going back to the medieval Icelandic sagas. In the past twenty years, international enthusiasm for Scandinavian crime fiction has exploded. Despite the relatively low rate of crime in the Scandinavian countries, the region’s authors have produced a gruesome corpus of works worthy of their Viking forebears, with dark and icy Nordic settings. This course will begin in the medieval period and work its way forward through the psychological murder of modern Scandinavian drama, leaping to the 1960s with Sweden’s first crime series by married couple Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, and Peter Høeg’s chilly thriller, Smilla’s Sense of Snow. We will also view Scandinavian detective films. The course will explore the narrative strategies of crime stories, the reader’s role in detection, social implications of the detective genre, the transition of writing into film, and the basis for the genre’s popularity. Part of our discussion will include the ways in which this genre reflects the society in which it is produced, as well as the aspects of form that seem to remain constant from nation to nation.

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills