CSP 65 Detective Fiction: Investigating Our Modern World

Since the appearance of popular detective fiction in the 1840s, no genre has been more widely produced and consumed. From the continuing relevance of Sherlock Holmes to the super abundance of investigation dramas in television and film, the genre -- both consciously and not -- has come to define what it means to use the rational mind to break down and make sense of our world. This course will look critically at these stories of detection, from their emergence in the early stages of modernization to their enduring popularity today, so as to ask what the detective figure can tell us about our revolution into the present: from what it means to be a professional problem solver in the first place to what problem solving can do when confronted with the shifting grounds that seem to undermine the simple rationality to which investigation first appealed.