Blithely disregarding the distinction between high and low culture, at once nostalgic and iconoclastic with respect to the legacies of Enlightenment rationality, detective fiction is also uniquely self-reflexive in the explicit thematization of its formal concerns with the principles of narrative construction, the mechanics of semiosis and interpretation, and the logic of emplotment. In this course, we will trace the history of the genre, from its beginnings in the nineteenth century to its more recent incarnations, and think about how it stages questions concerning such issues as the cultural and institutional practices of discipline and surveillance; the epistemologies of secrecy and disclosure; the aesthetics of the detail, the mystery, and the puzzle; the relationship between inquiry and desire; the overdetermined legibility of urban spaces; and the porous boundaries between self and other. Our primary texts will include works by Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, G. K. Chesterton, Dashiell Hammett, Jorge Luis Borges, Patricia Highsmith, and Agatha Christie, among others, as well as examples from television and film. In addition, we will also consider the sustained interest detective fiction has generated within a number of different theoretical traditions. (Fiction, 1830-1940, Theory)