engl 211 summer 2010 week 1.1.3
TRANSCRIPT
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
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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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ENGL 211, Summer 2010
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
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“The Newgate Calendar” Stories- popular between 1750-1850- Sensationalized tales of crime and punishment
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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