At SleuthSayers, I preview the syllabus for my Spring 2018 “True Crime” course at George Mason University—or rather, preview some of the titles I’m still considering for the course, including a couple of brand-new books (one not even out yet) and a podcast series too, first time I’ve taught that.
Here’s an excerpt from the post:
Much of the reading that was new that first time I taught “True Crime” came from the Library of America’s True Crime: An American Anthology—some well-known essays that covered a wider history and also a wider breadth of approaches, from the more strictly journalistic (Meyer Berger’s Pulitzer Prize-winning article “Veteran Kills 12 in Mad Rampage on Camden Street”) to works that bordered very close to fiction (Jim Thompson’s “Ditch of Doom”).
The course requires students both to craft analytical essays and try their hand at their own creative writing—or at least the opportunity to do the latter. The first assignment asks students to choose a crime that’s been covered in the class and to research other documents related to it—additional newspaper coverage from the same era as well as (potentially) more recent essays looking back on the crime—and to compare the approach in each, to evaluate which approaches might help reveal more about the “truth” of the crime. The creative writing assignment allows students to craft their own true crime essays, whether as memoir (amazing how many of us have been at least adjacent to crimes if not involved more intricately in them) or as investigative journalism at least at some rudimentary level.
Read the full post here—and suggestions welcome!