Following a few decades of low interest after the end of the Cold War, spy fiction experienced a resurgence after 9/11 with popular shows like Homeland, The Americans, and Archer. It would seem that we find espionage most interesting in times when we can envision a concrete enemy. This course will explore how tensions between the ethos and the practice of espionage produce changing and often contradictory views of nationhood. Who is included or excluded in national identity is inextricably bound to sites of difference like race, gender, class, sexuality, ability, and religion. How does espionage, which is premised both on closeness to the enemy and immaculate patriotism, show up in the way the nation constructs itself and its others? Spies and spying offer unique lenses through which to examine how nations grapple with the project of distinguishing the us from the them. We will begin with the Dreyfus Affair in 1894, and then move on to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), W. Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden: Or the British Agent (1928), Helen MacInnes’s While Still We Live (1944), Odell Bennett Lee’s The Formative Years of an African-American Spy: A Memoir (2012), as well as movies The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), The Lives of Others (2006), and Casino Royale (2006). (Fiction, 1830-1940, Theory)