engl 211 summer 2010 week 1.1.3

ENGL 211, Summer 2010

WEEK 1

A History of Literary Crime

ENGL 211, Summer 2010

“When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.”

-- crime + detective novelist Raymond Chandler, on writing fiction

ENGL 211, Summer 2010

“The evolution of the crime story reflects the history of crime itself”

-- Ernest Mandel, Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story

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Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) – first detective story

ENGL 211, Summer 2010

crime fiction detective fiction

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crime fiction v. detective fiction(“puzzle element”)

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I. Early Crime

Narratives

D.L. Sayers, “Introduction

Detective fiction writer and critic Dorothy L. Sayers:

- 4 stories, early ancestors of crime story - 2 Old Testament, Hercules, Herodotus

ENGL 211, Summer 2010

-Story of Hercules and Cacus the thief

- the thief falsifies footprints to evade capture

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- Herodotus’ story of King Rhampsinitus and the thief (5th Century BC)- first ‘locked-room’ mystery

Susanna and the Elders by Artemisia Gentileschi (1610)

Biblical story of Susanna and the Elders

Cain leads Abel to Death by James Tissot (1836-1902)

Cain and Abel, story of“first murder”

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- Nathaniel Hawthorne,The Scarlet Letter (1850)

- crime defined as social transgression (sets

boundaries of acceptable social behaviour)

- criminal is marked

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II. Crime and Revenge

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“Revenge Tragedy”-Late Elizabethean / Early Jacobean drama- end of the 16th – beginning -of the 17th centuries

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- revenge restores social unity and order in ways that official institutions of justice cannot or will not (Hamlet, 1601)

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- Subject of revenge meets a bloody death, either

by execution or by his/her own hand, in anticipation of being caught

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-Roman dramatist Seneca -(1st century), originator of the revenge tragedy

- violence off-stage, unlike the Elizabetheantheatre

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- classic detective fiction: no physical violence

towards, no legal prosecution, no

social exclusion of criminal

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III. “Gothic” Hauntings

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The gothic novel (late 18th century): return of the past into the present, especially in the form of ghosts or supernatural events

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“gothic” tradition: provides a narrative frame for “crime” as the return of a repressed wrong of the past into the world of the present

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IV. Organized Crime + Criminals

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1920’s prohibition-era gangsters, shift in fiction away from the individual criminal

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The GodfatherScarfaceGoodfellasThe SopranosGrand Theft Auto

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V. Discipline and Punish

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Michel FoucaultFrench Philosopher, critical theorist, historian,writer of Discipline and Punish (1975)

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ENGL 211, Summer 2010

Classical society – pre 19th century, punishment

Disciplinary society – post-19th century, surveillance

ENGL 211, Summer 2010

“The Newgate Calendar” Stories- popular between 1750-1850- Sensationalized tales of crime and punishment

ENGL 211, Summer 2010

ENGL 211, Summer 2010

“Who is the bigger criminal: he who robs a bank or he who founds one?”

-- playwright and Marxist Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera (1928)

ENGL 211, Summer 2010

Questions