Each year I teach an upper-level undergraduate course on U.S. Cultural History. One my favorite parts of the course is discussing Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. The novel allows me to make any number of observations that develop the larger themes of the course. It enables me to push the students on their formal analysis because I get to introduce a new genre: the hard-boiled detective novel. The process of formal analysis also allows me to point out that the novel offers a striking example of a MacGuffin--a plot device that catches the reader's and the characters' attention but is unimportant in itself except as a means of driving the plot forward. And finally I get to situate the formal analysis in a wider context--the novel appeared in 1930 shortly after the start of the Great Depression--which usually generates some befuddled conversation about why such a genre would be developed at that point in time and what that does for our understanding of the novel. And the students just love the book.
Here's what I don't do: I don't make them watch the brilliant 1941 film starring Humphrey Bogart and directed by John Huston. How can I justify this? I really can't.
