ENGL193 Detective Fiction
UCSB, Summer Session B, 2023
ENGL193 – Detective Fiction Henry Coburn
Introduction:
Detective fiction, thrillers, crime-fiction, noir – these are some of the most characteristic and most read forms of creative and imaginative writing of the last hundred years. In most cases, they follow a simple formula: a detective, often an amateur, is confronted with a crime, often a murder. They solve the crime, traverse the maze, unwrap the enigmas, riddles and puzzles – but how does this formula keep hooking us in in new way, and why, after all, do we want to read about crime? In this class we will read a range of detective stories and novels from both Britain and the US, considering issues such as: how suspense is cultivated and released in a long narrative; how detective stories manage doubt, certainty and belief; how fiction might work as social commentary; the Victorian origins of municipal policing; the place of crime and law enforcement in American life and in California specifically; the detective novel and the modern city; and, through all of these, the existential mystery of the individual trapped within the labyrinthine systems of modern society – a system where anything seems possible, and nothing is certain.
Primary Texts:
Please buy, borrow, or otherwise get access to these texts at your earliest convenience:
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles; Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd; Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
True Detective (TV show), Season One – Episodes One and Two [content warning: later episodes contain some distressing scenes referencing sexual violence, abuse of minors]
Course Requirements:
After the first class, the course will break down as follows:
- On the first three days of each week, M, T, and W, I will lecture on the assigned work(s). If I am unable to lecture in person in our assigned space, the lectures will be posted at the end of the assigned class time each day on Canvas.
- Thursday’s class time will be a discussion, and you must attend and engage with the topics discussed to gain full credit. Do the reading assigned for each day, watch any recorded lectures and any assigned video ‘texts’, and be prepared to discuss in class.
- Participation is judged by attendance and participation in Thursday’s discussion section, and constitutes 25% of your final grade.
- There will be a Midterm exam in Week 3 of the course, which counts for another 25% , and a Final in Week 6, also 25%. These will both be during class time (two Thursdays), and consist of specific comprehension questions about the texts covered thus far.
- A Final Paper will be due after the Final Exam for the final 25% of your grade. This is due Fri. Sept. 12, to be uploaded to Gauchospace, and should be around 1250 words (7 pages, double-spaced) and represent an in-depth and original discussion of one of our primary texts. There may also be a creative option available; more on that in class.
Syllabus:
Week 1: The Tip of the Thread: Civil Order and the System
Mon. Aug. 7: Introduction to the Course
Tues. Aug. 8: “The Man Who Knew His Foot” – Oedipus Rex and the Origins of Municipal Policing
Wed. Aug. 9: Edgar Allen Poe, ‘The Purloined Letter’ – The History of Mystery Thurs. Aug. 10: Discussion Section
Week 2: Conan Doyle and the Mysterious Phenomenon
Mon. Aug. 14: “Arthur Conan Doyle: Ghosthunter” – Doyle’s Induction and the Logic of Belief
Tues: Aug. 15: Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles – ‘As You Value Your Life or Your Reason’
Wed. Aug. 16: Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles, continued, and Sherlock, ‘The Hounds of Baskerville’ (TV episode) – Madness, Misery, Mystery
Thurs. Aug. 17: Discussion Section
Week 3: Christie and the Phenomenon of Mystery
Mon. Aug. 21: “Where did Agatha Go?” – Christie, her History and Legacy
Tues. Aug. 22: Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Unreliable Men Wed. Aug. 23: Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, continued
Thurs. Aug. 24: Midterm, during class time (1hr)
Week 4: Mid-Thread: Film/Noir and the Urban Labyrinth
Mon. Aug. 28: Chinatown, film (dir. Roman Polanski) – Los Angeles: a City on Fire
Tues. Aug. 29: Chinatown, continued, and Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep [extracts] – A
Californian Condition
Wed. Aug. 30: Vertigo, film (dir. Alfred Hitchcock) and Chandler, The Big Sleep, continued Thurs. Aug. 31: Discussion Section
Week 5: Information and Uncertainty in the Modern Psyche
Mon, Sept. 4: “Aarseth’s Maze” – the 20th-Century and Mass Media’s Fictions of Certainty
Tues. Sept. 5: Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 – Paranoid Fantasy and Finding ‘‘‘‘The Truth’’’’
Wed. Sept. 6: Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, continued Thurs. Sept. 7: Discussion Section
Week 6: Thread’s End: Existential Mystery and the Self
Mon. Sept. 11: True Detective, TV series, (writer Nic Pizzolatto) – ‘Seeing Things’ Tues. Sept 12: True Detective, continued
Wed. Sept. 13: End-of-course reflections
Thurs. Sept. 14: Final Exam, in class (1hr)
Fri. Sept. 15 (12pm): Final project due, via Canvas
Poetry by the Numbers: Pattern Recognition and Quantitative Approaches to Literary Analysis
Proposed Course, Graduate or Undergraduate-level
Instructor: Henry Patrick Coburn, PhD Candidate
Introduction:
How have the forms and formulas for composing poetry been dictated by patterns? How does thinking of a poem as a mere sequence of words or combination of letter-symbols detract from our understanding of meaning, and how is it enhanced by thinking of poetry as a system? To what extent can we think of literary history as an ongoing struggle to make and break rules for what “sounds good”? How does an artificial intelligence read, and replicate, writing style without reference to the outside world? This introductory course offers an entry into reading and understanding poetry through pattern recognition, quantitative reasoning and natural language processing techniques, and would be equally suited for those interested in reevaluating literature from a new perspective and those seeking to learn to apply digital humanities skills, systemic thinking and quantitative methods to literary analysis. The course will consist of 10 weeks, and 20 lectures of an hour and a quarter each, consisting of 1500 minutes of speaking time at a rate of around 100 words a minute for an inside estimate of 150,000 words total all for 8 units – but who’s counting?
Assignments:
Participation – 25% of Final Grade
Students will be required to attend lectures each week, read the required texts, and attend and participate in the weekly discussion sections in an engaged and committed manner that demonstrates the attention they have paid to the topics in class. All poetic texts will be provided digitally in full, while critical reading and theory will be provided as extracts – all must be read and digested by the end-of-week discussion. Students will be permitted one excused absence from section, provided they contact the teacher beforehand, have an unavoidable conflict or prior commitment and receive their permission; after this, each absence from class will receive a penalty of one grade increment (an A to an A-, e.g.).
‘Close Counting’ Poetry Analysis – 35% of Final Grade
Each member of the class will be required to complete two Close Readings of a text, which will involve both a quantitative analysis of its literary features and a detailed analysis of how these identified features form a pattern, represent intertextual trends across literary history, and contribute to and enrich the meaning of the words. The key question that must be answered in each will be: how does thinking of this text as a system, as well as a sequence of words, contribute to its semantic and emotional effect for a reader?
- The First exercise will be due at the end of Week 4, and must concern one of the texts covered on the syllabus thus far. Your submission must be at least 500 words and include an annotated copy of the poem or passage under analysis. This will count for 15% of your Final Grade.
- The Second exercise will be due at the end of Week 8, and must concern one of the texts covered on the syllabus and one text (poetry, prose or song lyrics) that has not been covered on the syllabus; there are no limitations on this second text apart from its suitability for pattern-based analysis. Your submission must be at least 750 words; annotated copies are not required but permissible to demonstrate your argument. This will count for 20% of your Final Grade.
Final Projects – 40% of Final Grade
Each student will be required to plan, implement and write up a literary analysis project using one or two of the Digital Humanities tools, methods or approaches that we will be covering in the latter half of the class. You must choose one specific text to analyse and your submission must consist of: an Introduction discussing the context and history of the author and text, a Methods and Approaches section that discusses the tools and Digital Humanities techniques you will employ and why they have been used, a Results section including any relevant data and diagrams to describe what you have found, and a Discussion and analysis of your findings and how they contribute to the implicit meaning and poetic effect of the test. Your assignment must be between 1500-2000 words overall and will be due after the final week of class.
Schedule:
Week 1: 1nce Upon a Time
Focuses: Overview of Pattern-Forming and Cognitive Bases/Biases; Apophenia and the Structure of Story; Structuralism, Generic Formulas, Tropes and Clichés
Texts: Dante’s Inferno, Cantos 1 and 2; Homer’s Odyssey
‘TV Tropes’ Online Encyclopedia
Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, ‘The Forager Oral Tradition and the Evolution of Prolonged Juvenility’; Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Week 2: From Me 2 You
Focuses: Received Rhyme and Rhythm Structures; The Shakespearean, Spenserian and Petrarchan Sonnet; Scansion and Parsing Metre; Iambic Pentametre, Trochaic Tetrametre and Triple Metre; the Villanelle and Sestina
Texts: William Shakespeare, Sonnets 18 and 121; Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Ozymandias’; Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘The Kraken’
William Blake, ‘The Tyger’
Elizabeth Bishop, ‘Sestina’; Dylan Thomas, ‘Do Not Go Gentle’; Billy Collins, ‘Paradelle for Susan’
Week 3: The Rule of 3
Focuses: The ‘Trivium’; Patterning in Rhetoric; Tricolons, Triplets and Trilogies; Trinity and Trimurti
Texts: William Shakespeare, ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen’ from Julius Caesar
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ‘This is the Forest Primeval’
Millman Parry and Alfred Lord, The Singer of Tales
Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato
Week 4: What We Write 4
Focuses: The ‘Quadrivium’; Mathematical Patterns as Integrated with Affect and Reader Response Theory; Rhyme and Rhythm as Employed in Hip-Hop and Songwriting
Texts: De La Soul, ‘The Magic Number’; MF DOOM, ‘Figaro’; Black Thought, ‘Funk Flex Freestyle’, JAY-Z and Eminem, ‘Renegade’
Daniel Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music
Act 5: Breaking the Mold
Focuses: European Modernism and Post-Modernisms; Reactionaries, Reparations and Post-Structuralist Theory; Post-Colonial Responses and New Uses of ‘the Master’s Tools’; Traditions, Biases and Assumptions
Texts: Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘The Windhover’
Ezra Pound, Cantos 1 and 18, T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Derek Walcott, Omeros
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence
Week 6: Recognising the Pattern
Focuses: Elementary Quantitative Analysis; the Limitations and Opportunities Afforded by Quantitative Reasoning; Plot Graphs; What Literature Looks Like to a Computer
Texts: Claude Shannon, The Mathematical Theory of Communication
Allen Renear, Elli Mylonas, and David Durand, ‘Refining our Notion of What Text Really Is: The Problem of Overlapping Hierarchies’
Lawrence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
Tools: ANTConc; Google N-Grams
Week 7: The Algorhythm
Focuses: Digital Humanities Approaches, Natural Language Processing, Large Language Models and Generated Text
Texts: Katherine Bode, ‘The Equivalence of “Close” and “Distant” Reading’
Matthew Jockers, Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History
Shawna Ross, Reading Modernism with Machines
Willard McCarty, Humanities Computing
Tools: AntConc; Google N-Grams; Chat-GPT
Week 8: False Binaries
Focuses: AI and Recurrent Neural Networks; Inclusion and Encouragement of A.I. Tools and Critical AI; Coded Bias and Corpus Training Techniques and Interpretive Implications
Texts: Gwern Branwen, GPT-3 Creative Fiction
Stephen Ramsay, ‘Toward an Algorithmic Criticism’
Coded Bias (202 Film, Dir. Shalini Kantayya)
Tools: Chat-GPT; DALL-E and MidJourney; AI Dungeon
Week 9: … Predictably Enough
Focuses: Applied Approaches and Example Digital Projects; Marrying Close Reading and Computational Linguistics
Texts: Matthew Jockers, Text Analysis with R for Students of Literature
Martin Paul Eve, Close Reading with Computers
Giuseppina Balossi, A Corpus Linguistic Approach to Literary Language and Characterization
Week 10: End-of-Course Reflections and Project Workshopping
Proposed Course: CITRAL (Center for Innovative Teaching, Research and Learning, UCSB)
Arnhold Innovative Teaching and Learning Initiative Course Proposal
FUTURE PARANOID: SPECULATIVE FICTION, MASS MEDIA, AND INFORMATION IN THE POST-TRUTH ERA
Instructors: Henry Patrick Coburn, PhD Candidate
R Baker, PhD Candidate
Introduction:
In Imagination: A Manifesto, Ruha Benjamin argues the contemporary world is “between stories”, and that collective imagination is a key force for social change. But how does the flow of information, particularly in mass media and digital environments, affect what we think is true or false, impossible or inevitable? In a social media-saturated world of decentralized information, awash with fake news and violent rhetoric, we must learn to cut through this turmoil and develop skills to critically evaluate research, resist false or dangerous narratives, and understand complex relationships between information media, identity, and power.
In this course, we read speculative “paranoid” fictions of authors like PK Dick, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut alongside interdisciplinary scholarship on media, information, and rhetoric as tools of control. Topics will include: “paranoid” vs reparative reading strategies (Eve Sedgewick), racialized surveillance (Ruha Benjamin), algorithms and AI (Safiya Noble and Cory Doctrow), economic systems (Mark Fisher), higher education (Paul Tough), labor (Manuel Castells) and environmental policy (Naomi Klein). Course outcomes will emphasize development of multi-modal research literacy skills, rhetorical awareness, and effective communication strategies. In the latter part of the course, students will design and develop public-facing, collaborative research projects based on course themes.
- Proposed Enrollment: This course is currently designed to accommodate 50 undergraduate students
If permitted and approved, this course is designed to function as two 4-unit courses that students enroll in concurrently–one that meets a GER Area requirement (see clarification below), and one that meets Special Subject Area writing requirement
- Subject area requirements: Pending faculty senate approval, this course is designed to meet the following GENERAL EDUCATION REQUIREMENTS: Area A (English Reading and Composition), Area E (Culture and Thought), and Area G (Literature); additionally, pending approval, it will meet the SPECIAL SUBJECT AREA Writing Requirement
MCA Course Description :
In this course, we read speculative “paranoid” fictions by authors PK Dick, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut alongside interdisciplinary scholarship on information, media rhetoric, and control. Topics include: racialized surveillance, AI, education, labor, and environmental policy. Course outcomes emphasize research literacy, rhetorical awareness, effective written communication, and project-based collaborative research
Possible Innovative Teaching Strategies :
This course is specifically designed to help students develop interdisciplinary research literacy skills, rhetorical awareness surrounding audience, tone, bias, etc, and the ability to critically analyze arguments and sources in multimedia communication.
This course has two distinct parts. The beginning part will comprise the first four weeks of term, and will focus on content (speculative fiction novels, alongside interdisciplinary scholarship–see course description for details). Student evaluation will take place via focused discussions and small, informal writing assignments. Although some lecture will be necessary to help untangle complex theory and historical context, the majority of class time will be spent in seminar-style, participatory conversation. Additionally, students will work in pairs to collaboratively create a shared Zotero library, to find, analyze, and annotate relevant supplemental sources.
The latter part will occur during the final two weeks–based on students’ interests, we will organize them into groups of 4 or 5 (depending on enrollment numbers) to develop a central research question, and create a public-facing, collaborative research project platformed online. Most work will occur during scheduled class time, with instructors regularly checking in and providing guidance as necessary. Here is an example of a similar assignment, which Baker designed for English 10. Research topics should combine focus on course content, critical research questions, and current events–for example: Cold War discourse in PK Dick’s novels, and how it maps onto the current conversations surrounding AI and surveillance; or, Thomas Pynchon’s fascination with conspiracy and information overwhelm, and how this informs understanding regarding social media phenomena like QAnon, Covid denial, etc. Students will be encouraged to explore these topics using multiple approaches, including (but not limited to) curating lists of accessible sources for non-expersts, creating short films or podcasts, developing infographics, designing an example course syllabus, and otherwise synthesizing their arguments in rhetorically savvy ways. Ideally, this course can be taught in one of the project-based learning labs within the ILP.
Possible UCSB-based guest speakers include Joe Walther, whose work focuses on social media and dynamics of online hate; Rita Raley, whose work focuses on machine intelligence with an emphasis on LLMs, and Tania Israel, whose work centers discourse, oppression, and policy surrounding queer communities.
Additionally, we plan to schedule at least two workshop sessions at the UCSB Library, regarding how to effectively utilize the library search database (and others like JSTOR), and how to critically evaluate sources based on citations, publisher, author bias, etc.
