ENGL 23049 - Procedurals

Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
PROCEDURALS American and British popular culture is saturated with procedurals: stories that focus on the process of solving a criminal case, usually though not always a murder, and revealing its secrets. These procedurals may appear in serial form, as did many early “mystery novels,” but our idea of the “murder mystery” is deeply linked to the novel form. In this course, we will discuss the history and development of the procedural, including both police procedurals and stories featuring independent investigators. We will read many variations on this form from its 19th-century antecedents to contemporary novels, and will also address adaptations (The Killing, Gracepoint, etc.), cultural appropriation, and creative responses to popular procedurals (paintings of Law & Order characters, novellas that foreground the strangeness of the subgenre). We will aim to investigate, ourselves, what makes this form so popular and what cultural purposes its continual variations suit. [AH]