ENGL 249 Novel and Film Noir
This course explores the dark and vivid world of the classic American novel and film noir-a complex, dangerous, romantic, corrupt, deceptive, ambiguous, and remarkably entertaining realm in which dreams and nightmares, hopes and fears, desire and dread, free will and fate are inextricably intertwined. Literary texts include novels by James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, Patricia Highsmith, and Jim Thompson and short stories by Hemingway, Hammett, and Chandler. Films include The Asphalt Jungle, The Big Sleep, Chinatown, Double Indemnity, Gilda, The Killers, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, The Lady From Shanghai, Laura, Out of the Past, Rear Window, Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on a Train, Sunset Boulevard, The Third Man, Touch of Evil, Vertigo, The Wages of Fear, and White Heat.