Description: This course qualifies for the Loser Studies Track in the English Department. What if you were young innocent and inexplicably found yourself on trial for murder in the first degree? WHat if the judgment were a matter of your life or death? WHAt if you were convicted, imprisoned, escaped, and were caught again? WHAT IF? WHAT IF there were no court of appeals? WHAT IF?? WHAT IF you were not only prosecuted but persecuted? WHAT IF the state of exception proved to be the rule of law? WHAT IF you were detained indefinitely by the state? WHAT IF you were mistakenly identified by eyewitnesses and your own fingerprints matched those of the real criminal? WHAT IF your efforts to detect a crime only implicated you as the criminal?? WHAT IF you thought a madman got away with murder but when you told people they thought you were the madman??? WHAT IF you were the madman???? WHAT IF you found yourself powerless, paralyzed, unable to help yourself????? And WHAT IF you in turn persecuted someone else?! WHAT IF you were guilty but not at fault?!! More generally, WHAT IF the "reasonable" person on which the law depends turns out to be unreasonable?!!! WHAT IF the distinction between the reasonable and unreasonable person is impossible to draw? WHAT IF the rule of law is itself unruly?!!!! WHAT IF guilt is not a matter of biometrics, detection, forensics, of legally admissible evidence, of enlightenment, of conjecture and clues, of innocence and guilt??! WHAT IF liberal democratic politics turns out to founder on a dark metaphysics, a metaphysics so dark that reason can itself become irrational, fatally so??!! WHAT IF critical accounts of the panoptic power of omniscient surveillance is just a paranoid hallucination? WHAT IF belief in justice is a demented, deluded belief that one's own powers of observation and detection can correctly decide between the accused's guilt or innocence???!!!! WHAT IF the law were a machine, a writing machine that no one controlled????!!!! WHAT IF every moment of seeming lucid rationality ends up casting longer and darker shadows of incrimination, perpetually postponing the possibility of exoneration, and that, even if reached, turns out to have been always already exhausted?????!!!!!! We will pursue these and other alarming and disturbing yet sometimes oddly humorous "WHAT IF" existential, legal, and philosophical questions by reading immersively in the cold, sometimes breathy, mysterious fog and boiling passions of wildly engaging literature and film, including two nineteenth-century British Gothic novels, a Greek tragedy, a German short story, and German and Hollywood crime films and film noirs, including Fritz Lang, M (1931); Fritz Lang, Fury (1936); Fritz Lang, You Only Live Once (1937); Alfred Hitchcock, The Wrong Man (1956); William Godwin, Caleb Williams; Shock Corridor (dir. Sam Fuller, 1962); The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (dir. John Ford, 1962); Orson Welles, The Trial (1962); Sophocles, Oedipus Rex; Stranger on the Third Floor (dir. Boris Ingster, 1940); James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; Franz Kafka, "The Penal Colony"; The Tenant; Lost Highway