The Detective and the City

This seminar will analyze the social reality of three historic cities (London in the 1890s, San Francisco and Los Angeles in the 1920s and 30s, and Shanghai in the 1990s) through the prism of popular crime fiction featuring four great literary detectives (Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, Roman Polanski's Jake Gittes, and Qiu Xiaolong's Chief Inspector Chen). As a student in this course, you will explore why crime fiction is so popular, why the fear of crime - or perhaps just a fascination with crime -- is so much a part of modern urban culture, and why the police detective and the private investigator have become iconic code heroes of pulp fiction, movies, TV shows, and even video games. If you take this class, you will have the opportunity to write a paper and present your research on one of the classic literary detectives, another literary detective of your own choosing, or on one of today's related manifestations of the same impulse in popular visual culture featuring superheroes, vampires, and the zombie apocalypse.