Professor: Ulrick Casimir
credits 4.00
- CRN 22654: Monday & Wednesday, 4:00-5:20pm @ CHA 202
Mystery editor Otto Penzler once described noir as something that is “virtually impossible to define, but everyone thinks they know it when they see it.” Situated at a crossroads of visual and print media—sped along by the consequences of one war, and solidified by observations made as another war ended—noir is a signifier that seems meant to avoid being pinned down. We do know that noir is generally grounded in big themes: class, gender, race, corruption, alienation, subjectivity, and free will, to name a few. Focused on narrative fiction as well as visual media (a number of paintings, but mostly film), this section of HC 301H examines ""noir"" as often used to describe both writing and film. Over the term, we will work together to flesh out the historical, cultural, and critical contexts/frameworks necessary to unpack ""noir""; we will also examine why noir continues to appeal to writers, readers, film-goers, and gamers today.
Readings span the 20th & 21st centuries. Primary written texts include three brief novels or novellas by such authors as James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice), Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep), and Megan Abbott (Queenpin), as well as short stories by James Ellroy, David Goodis, Cornell Woolrich, Lawrence Block, Hughes Allison, and Joe Gores. Films include F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1924), Jacques Torneur’s Out of the Past (1947), Byron Haskin’s Too Late for Tears (1949), Robert Wise's The Set-Up (1949), Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1981), David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive ( 2001), Nicolas Refn’s Drive (2011), Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly (2012), and Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049 (2019). Secondary texts include short essays (Abbott, Chandler, Paul Schrader, Karen Hollinger) selected to help contextualize the readings and films, as well as a few brief selections from longer pieces (Peter Selz, Alain Silver et. al., Richard Taylor, Émile Durkheim) that are broadly germane to the theme and approach of the course. A significant amount of the secondary reading in this course will be material that students discover through guided research. Coursework includes one group presentation per student, four research-project reports, a research-project proposal, an annotated bibliography, and a term paper of 10-12 pages.