Starting on the first day of class when I did not even know how to pronounce the word “noir,” I feel like this course has continually challenged me in exactly the manner that I had hoped for when I signed up for it. In the first place, it has exposed me to literature that I am certain I would have not come across in any other class that is offered here at Notre Dame. While I have appreciated the very classical education that the English degree here has given me, there is no doubt in my mind that it is important to expand beyond the typical American and English literary canon. This class, as one that was listed as non-American and non-English literature, certainly gave me a good sense for exactly why it is important to expand beyond the aforementioned canon; the rich, if unorthodox, literature that I have been introduced to in this class will stick with me (and stick out in my mind for years to come when I think about my English degree) because of its difference from almost everything else I have read for school and for personal enjoyment. The books felt distinctly modern (even the oldest books that we read are comparatively modern) and often distinctly American.
The city culture that we read about with shady figures everywhere and things happening in the shadows all the time is something that has always been familiar to me, but never in a literary context. Moving from seeing these sort of news stories to seeing the same type of plots written in novel form has been an incredibly fun and rewarding experience. I think that when we read a news story we do so with a much different eye than we do when we read a work of fiction – even when that work of fiction directly reflects reality. As a result, I have become much more aware of the types of motivations and incentives that go into some of the personal stories and news stories that I have grown accustomed to. In this way, the fiction of noir – and specifically the black noir that this course has focused on – has paradoxically given me a better sense of reality, especially in the context of African-American city life. Many of my posts have reflected this personal experience that I have since I spent many of my formative years in Brooklyn (a setting that I believe is ripe for a great noir novel!), and how the characters in the book are identifiable to me by their backgrounds, opinions, or motivations. In fact, as this course went on and the books got more modern and less shackled by wanting to fit into the typical hardboiled detective genre associated with noir, the books became easier to read. I know that many of my classmates perhaps felt as if the material became harder to engage with, but I think that there is something much more familiar about what we read in the second half of the course than there is with someone like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. I do not know a single private detective, and I have never even heard of one similar to Sam Spade. For better or for worse I know plenty of people gripped by addiction, poverty, and a desire for a better life that leads them to make questionable decisions. Again, seeing these types of characters in fictional works has given me a whole new perspective on the same sort of people in the real world.
As a final note on the course, and more specifically the blog posts, I was very satisfied with the structure of the weekly assignments. The open-ended nature of the blog posts (and the final paper) have given me the opportunity to engage with the parts of the text that I find most intriguing. While this approach by a professor can be double-edged (since sometimes students struggling to grasp material want nothing more than some prompting questions or ideas), I find it to be incredibly useful at this level of my academic journey. Being that I am a senior, I appreciate being trusted to engage with the text appropriately and in a constructive manner, which I felt like I was in this course.
I feel that I have learned a great deal about analyzing literature and connecting it to our own lives from listening to you speak about the books we have read. I agree with your point that we view stories of darkness on the news with different eyes than that of fiction. I am not very familiar with city life in real life because I grew up in Wyoming, but it seems to me that the great fear and paranoia that rural people hold about crime and disorder in big cities often stem from a lack of understanding of the factors that cause them. I can only speak to my own experiences, but this class has introduced me to a completely different genre of literature and view of the world than I am used to, and for that it has been an incredibly rewarding experience.