Teaching Crime Narratives: Historicizing Genre and the Politics of Form

This chapter will examine the teaching of crime narratives in the context of an undergraduate module on American Crime Fiction. My purpose is to elucidate how the study of crime fiction can be a way of helping students understand the politics of narrative form. As such it traces the progression of the module from the reading of Poe’s detective stories through the narrative disruptions of mid-century hardboiled crime fiction to more contemporary noir fiction by authors such as Sara Paretsky and Attica Locke. I will discuss how students become accustomed to historicizing shifts in the ways crime narratives are constructed.