ENGLISH 221—POPULAR LITERATURE:  MYSTERY AND DETECTIVE FICTION

AMERICAN STUDIES 286—POPULAR LITERATURE:  MYSTERY AND DETECTIVE FICTION

Note:  although the course titles are different, the course work is identical, since Mystery and Detective Fiction is both a popular genre of literature and a uniquely American genre of literature.  You can register for either number, and both transfer as Humanities credit.

Instructor:  J. Kotker                          

e-mail  address:  jkotker@bcc.ctc.edu

Office Hours:  These are online.  I check into the site every day except Sunday, and I almost always respond within 24 hours to student questions and requests.

CAUTION:  For English 221, your placement scores should be at the college level for reading and at the English 101 level for composition. Students with scores lower than these have real problems with the course and usually end up dropping it. It is also very helpful to have had a 100-level literature course before taking this one.

Also, you should have good computer skills in terms of using attachments with e-mail, posting to bulletin boards, down-loading files and the like.  If you are new to computers, the course will frustrate you to the point of despair, because you will really be trying to take two courses at once:  one on how to use computers and one on English literature.  You need to have the technical knowledge before you take the course so that you can concentrate on the subject matter.  And do begin by going through the Vista tutorial, once you have been entered in the class—this will save you hours of time later in the course.

And finally, Online courses are very intense, because on average it takes about three times as long to do an online class as it does to do the identical course in the classroom, and you must cover the same amount of work, since you receive the same number of credits for each type of class.  You should plan to spend three hours a day on the course, every day, so make sure that you really do have a schedule that will let you make this commitment for the entire quarter.

Okay:  now to the heart of the course:

This quarter's Popular Literature course will focus on crime fiction.  We will be applying the analytical approaches used for literature in general to a literature that is, by common consent, a literature of entertainment.  We will be looking at crime literature as one particular genre and studying the conventions of that genre.  We will also consider the historical development of this genre, the influence of certain authors on the genre and on each other, and the ways in which works of crime fiction reflect their own time and society.

The format of the course will consist of a combination of lecture and discussion.  There will be short, factual quizzes on each work, short practice papers on different aspects of formal analysis, a final exam and a full formal analysis paper.  There is no make-up on quizzes, the final paper or the exams, but I will drop your two lowest quiz scores.    More on this under Quizzes.

In the research paper you will analyze one of two Faulkner short stories that we are reading this quarter, combining the methods of analysis that have been used in the class over the quarter.    You will have an assigned due date for this paper; papers turned in after the assigned due date will not count toward course credit.

Regular participation is expected of you in this course because it is the basis for the discussion and much of the learning that will take place not only for you but for everyone else in the class.  Thus, on each quiz I’ll have you create a question that you will post to the bulletin board.  Everyone in the class will be expected to participate in the discussion of these questions, since these bulletin board discussions take the place of the discussion that would go on in a regular classroom, and it is therefore essential that you be a regular participant:  you are helping to create the online illusion of a classroom by doing so.  It is impossible to earn a grade of “A” in this course without significant participation in discussions and while “significant” is a judgment call, I will be the one to make it and defend it.  If in doubt, participate in every discussion.

I am attaching the reading list to this syllabus, so that if you want to you can buy the books ahead of time and get a sense of what will be required of you.

NOTE:  This syllabus is subject to change.

English 221/American Studies 286:  Reading List

            Poe, “The Purloined Letter” (download this story from reading list site)

            Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles

            Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

            Le Carre, Call for the Dead

            Hammett, The Maltese Falcon

Grimes, The Anodyne Necklace

Sjowall and Wahloo, The Locked Room

Connelly, The Lincoln Lawyer

            Faulkner, Knights' Gambit

            James, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman

            Westlake, “Too Many Crooks” (download this story from reading list site)

All of these books (with the exception of the two short stories noted above) are available in the BCC Bookstore.