This course will examine ways in which conspiracies, conspiracy theories, and what one leading historian famously called "the paranoid style" have helped shape American culture and have been expressed in American events and cultural products, especially but not only novels and films. Readings, film viewings and class presentations will provide an overview of leading conspiracy theories and of works dealing with these or imagining others. Topics to be discussed include the various uses of conspiracy as an artistic device; how a feeling, mentality or political attitude like paranoia has been and might be artistically expressed; how particular themes and character types recur and are transformed in different periods and for different purposes; and how fictions have responded to and at times anticipated real events.
- Enseignant: Jeffrey Alan Smith