Seminar Cultural Translations and Transfers The Beginnings of Detective Fiction in the USA France and Britain Mi 08.30

Office hours in February: WEDNESDAY, 3 FEBRUARY, FROM 14:00 TO 15:00 WEDNESDAY, 10 FEBRUARY, FROM 15:00 TO 16:00 WEDNESDAY, 17 FEBRUARY, FROM 13:30 TO 14:30 Since its rise and popularization in the latter half of the nineteenth century, detective fiction has developed into one of the world’s most popular and best-selling forms of commercial literature. This course sets out to explore the genre’s early history from the 1840s to the 1940s in order to trace its most salient features (e.g., the detective’s eccentricities and power of deduction, his cool superiority to the professional police, his intimate knowledge of his urban environment) to their points of origin. In the first part, we will explore the multi-national development of detective fiction, emphasizing the various acts of linguistic, cultural, and geographical -translation” that this process involved – from the first emergence of police and private detectives in France (Eugène François Vidocq) through the Chevalier Dupin stories of American writer Edgar Allan Poe to the Monsieur Lecoq mysteries of Emile Gaboriau and the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. In the second half of the term, we will shift the focus to the interwar period of the twentieth century, when detective fiction bifurcated into the British whodunit (Agatha Christie) and the American hardboiled thriller (Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler). By adopting a transatlantic perspective, we will be able to analyze both the continuities and the differences between British and American crime writing. As will become obvious, detective fiction is a remarkably -translatable” and malleable form, despite its roots in specific historical and cultural circumstances. To be purchased : (1.) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I (Bantam Classics, 1986), ISBN: 978-0553212419; (2.) Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (HarperCollins, 2002), ISBN: 978-0007141340; (3.) Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely (Penguin, 2010), ISBN: 978-0241954355. All other materials short stories and excerpts from novels, essays and criticism will be made available in a digital reader on the ILIAS platform. Anglistik V - Anglophone Literaturen/Literaturübersetzen Universität Düsseldorf WiSe 2015/16 Dr. Frank Michael