True Crime: Fact and Feeling, 1927-Prese

     True crime is often dismissed as trashy and exploitative. Nevertheless, it has always attracted serious authors, playwrights, filmmakers and journalists, and it has produced great works of art. True crime is fascinating because it prompts a search for truths, both factual and emotional, that can never be fully known. It appeals to our emotions and our craving for sensation, but also our desire to make sense of the insensible. With its use of both fact and feeling, true crime raises important philosophical and ethical questions: What does society find morally outrageous, or morally ambiguous? What counts as evidence? What is the relationship between truth, justice and the law?

     In this course we define true crime broadly: it means any piece (factual or fictional, with much gray area in between) that tells the story of a real-life crime. We will break down the various features of true crime as a genre, paying particular attention to how these features travel and change across media. We’ll be discussing how particular cases strike a chord and resonate with larger social and cultural issues.

     We will start by defining true crime as a genre, examining a sensational tabloid case from the 1920s. We’ll see how different tellings of this crime expressed contemporary anxieties about modernity, labor and gender. We then turn to true crime’s exploration of the boundary between fiction and journalism. We look at how the hybrid genre of the “nonfiction novel,” and fictional portrayals of journalism raise epistemic and ethical questions about the telling of true crime stories. Moving forward into the 1980s and 1990s, we will consider how skepticism about objective truth lead to new, “performative” styles of true crime in documentary film and long-form journalism, culminating in the pioneering podcast Serial. We will then look at true crime in the age of cable news and the Internet, which makes heightened emotional appeals. We’ll examine different versions of sensational cases, from the O. J. Simpson trial to hate crimes and serial killers. We will conclude by examining how contemporary true crime stories have looked at specific cases as a way of exposing larger flaws in the criminal justice system.

     The course raises many questions: In what ways does true crime channel anxieties about social norms and change? How does true crime express