SF-1198 True Crime
True crime is wildly popular genre with an extraordinary reach across forms and audiences, as evidenced by blockbusters like Michelle McNamara's I'll Be Gone in the Dark and the podcast Serial. But while true crime texts may pull us in with the deviant, lurid, or outlandish, the best of them endure through their ability to situate crime within various social and historical contexts, and examine it through lenses of gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, region, religion, and more. In this course, we will study journalism, memoirs, podcasts, and documentaries interested in crime across the spectrum, from the absurd, to the violent, to the historical crimes that endure in the modern imagination. We will also examine the very popularity of the genre and what it means to write ethically and empathetically about the crimes that, in various ways, reveal our shared humanity.