T3 4110 - Kiss Me Deadly: American Detective Fiction and Film Noir

• Students will demonstrate an ability to synthesize the differential relations, both formal and thematic, between detective fiction and film noir.
• Students will demonstrate complex critical skills in interpreting literary and cinematic works and, more generally, the mass media that shapes the contemporary society in which they live.
• Students will examine the categories of race and class, gender and sexuality, nation and ethnicity, as they are dramatized in American and transnational literary and cinematic texts.
• Students will reflect on the way in which particular literary and cinematic works speak to our current socio-cultural context.
• Students will use the internet to read screenplays, stream films, and survey the online criticism on individual films and on the film noir genre as a whole.
• Students will work collaboratively together to present an in-class, “shot-by-shot” analysis of a specific passage of a film.