Description: "Murder, George Orwell lamented in his 1946 essay "Decline of the English Murder," isn't what it used to be. Unlike what he calls "our great period in murder" - roughly 1850 to the beginning of the Second World War - contemporary murder has lost it aesthetic appeal. "There is," he writes, "no depth of feeling in it." This class will examine the modernist fascination with murder, asking not only why it became a topic of such particular interest to artists, writers, and filmmakers during this time, but what it can tell us about modernist aesthetics more broadly." Mutually Exclusive: Cannot register for HART 413 if student has credit for HART 507.