Parkes, Adam
TR 12:45 PM
Park Hall 136
Reading authors from Buchan to Le Carré, this class will trace the development of a distinctively modern fictional genre in its literary, cultural, and political historical contexts from late Victorian imperialism to the Cold War. Our primary focus will be fixed on British writers and the ways in which they represent espionage in Britain and Europe. As well as studying a number of primary texts, we will read in the history of spy fiction and espionage. We will think about what spying and fiction have to do with each other. We will also consider how spy fiction emerges from various popular genres during and after the modernist period in literature and the arts. Other topics of discussion will include: espionage and empire; the world wars and the Cold War; ideological conflict and nation-states; nationality and identity in the modern surveillance state; gender, sexuality, and the family; spies in literature and popular cinema and television. The final project will offer an opportunity to examine recent variations on such themes in visual media.
Required Texts
Please obtain print copies of the following paperback editions and bring to class the book or books you will need for any given day:
Eric Ambler, Epitaph for a Spy (Vintage, 2002). ISBN: 0375713247
Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (Anchor, 2002). 0385721285
John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps (Oxford UP, 2009). 0199537879
Len Deighton, The Ipcress File (HarperCollins 2015). 0008124787
Ian Fleming, Casino Royale (Thomas & Mercer, 2012). 1612185436
George Orwell, 1984 (Signet, 1961). 9780451524935
John Le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (Penguin, 2013). 0143124757
Helen MacInnes, Above Suspicion (Titan, 2013). 9781781161531
On dates that will be specified in the daily syllabus, you will need to rent two spy films on Amazon Prime Video: Dr. No and The Lives of Others. For the final project, you will need to obtain access (whether on TV, DVD, Amazon Prime Video, or Netflix, or some other technology) to one full season of one of the following series: Spooks (US title: MI-5), Homeland, The Americans, Fauda.