32202
Advanced Seminar
SoSe 23: Hardboiled Nation: Fiction for Hard Times
James Dorson
Comments
Plunging us into the shady world of hard-boiled crime fiction, this class explores the stylistic and thematic elements that define one of the most popular genres in the US, including its cynical protagonists, violent settings, and suspenseful plots. Through close readings of four classical hard-boiled novels—Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest (1929), Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939), Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place (1947), and Chester Himes’s The Real Cool Killers (1959)—we will analyze how the genre negotiates questions of social justice and morality in a world defined by the “hard” bourgeois values of competition and commerce. Inquiring into the genre’s alternating perpetration and interrogation of stereotypes like the tough guy and femme fatale, the class asks how the gender panic—a perceived threat to white masculinity—in these novels resonates with contemporary debates, as well as how the genre changes as female and non-white authors appropriate its tropes and stylistic conventions close
14 Class schedule
Regular appointments
Wed, 2023-04-19 10:00 - 12:00
Wed, 2023-04-26 10:00 - 12:00
Wed, 2023-05-03 10:00 - 12:00
Wed, 2023-05-10 10:00 - 12:00
Wed, 2023-05-17 10:00 - 12:00
Wed, 2023-05-24 10:00 - 12:00
Wed, 2023-05-31 10:00 - 12:00
Wed, 2023-06-07 10:00 - 12:00
Wed, 2023-06-14 10:00 - 12:00
Wed, 2023-06-21 10:00 - 12:00
Wed, 2023-06-28 10:00 - 12:00
Wed, 2023-07-05 10:00 - 12:00
Wed, 2023-07-12 10:00 - 12:00
Wed, 2023-07-19 10:00 - 12:00