Hardboiled Course Calendar, Fall 2012

Tentative Course Calendar
http://hardboiled.umwblogs.org/files/2012/08/ava_burt_the_killers_1946.jpeg

Week 1: Introductions and Detective Fiction and the Genre Novel

 * Tue: Introductions Syllabus Review
 * Thu: Introduction to the Detective Genre (Hand-out/reading from Stephen Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature)

Week 2: High Modernism

 * Tue: Discuss Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time (Stories up to and including The Three-day Blow)
 * Thu: Continue discussion of In Our Time (“The Battler” to “Big Two Hearted River: Part 2”)

Week 3: Modernisms’ Highs and Lows: Dashell Hammett and the Hardboiled Novel

 * Tue: Discuss Dashell Hammett’s Red Harvest Chapter 1-13
 * Thu: Continue discussion Chapters 13-30 of Red Harvest

Week 4: Miller's Crossing

 * Tue. Film in Class
 * Thu. Discussion

Week 5: John Fante as LA's Marginal Modernist

 * Tue. Discussion up to chapter 12 of Ask the Dust
 * Thu. Discussion of rest of Ask the Dust

Week 6: Noir as Film Genre

 * Tue: Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (screenplay written by Raymond Chandler) Read selections from from James Naremore’s More than Night
 * Thu: Library Research Session

Week 7: The Pulp Writer and Noir as Subgenre: James M. Caine

 * Tue. Discuss First 9 chapters of Mildred Pierce
 * Thu. Discuss remainder of Mildred Pierce

Week 8: Midterm

 * Tue: No Class - Fall Break
 * Thu: Midterm

Week 9: Patricia Highsmith and Queering 1950s Noir

 * Tue. Discussion through chapter 23 of Strangers on a Train
 * Thu. Finish Strangers on a Train

Week 10: The New Noir: Race and the Hardboiled Genre

 * Tue Hurricane Sandy (Class Cancelled)
 * Thu Discuss First Half (up to chapter 18) of Cotton Comes to Harlem

Week 11: Wikipedia Project & Finish Cotton Comes to Harlem

 * Tue Wikipedia Project and Cotton Comes to Harlem
 * Thu Watch film version of Cotton Comes to Harlem

Week 12: Hardboiled Women: VI Warshawski

 * Tue Discussion of first half of Indemnity Only
 * Thu Finish discussion of Indemnity Only

Week 13: Hardboiled History: James Ellroy

 * Tue Discussion of Black Dahlia
 * Thu Discussion of Black Dahlia

Week 14: Alternative Histories: Genre as corrective?

 * Tue Discussion of Devil in a Blue Dress
 * Thu Discussion of Devil in a Blue Dress

Week 15: Hardboiled DC

 * Tue Discussion of The Big Blowdown
 * Thu Discussion of The Big Blowdown

Final Exam
SYLLABUS SUBJECT TO CHANGE.
 * Thursday, December 13th from 7-9:30 PM