November 25, 2008
Interview with Professor James Tolan, and BMCC students David Curtin and Alyse Dorcil.
“I first fell in love with detective stories as a child, reading them with my dad,” says James Tolan, an assistant professor of English at BMCC. These days, Tolan conveys his passion for the genre through a 300-level English elective—“The Detective Story.”
“Apart from its intrinsic appeal, the detective story is a great vehicle for teaching critical thinking,” says Tolan. “In many of the books we read, the detective is an archetypical figure—an outsider who has learned to live by his wits in a culture that seems increasingly corporatized and dominated by mass sensibilities.”
A touch of the poet
As Tolan sees it, the detective genre provides a way “to cherish the individual and give students a sense of independence and clear, critical, creative thought that they can extend beyond classroom work—especially in what is becoming an increasingly stifling world.”
Tolan is a widely published poet, and many of his students feel that the special sensibility he brings to the study of detective fiction adds immeasurably to the course’s appeal. “He definitely adds a poetic look at the world,” says David Curtin, a second-year liberal arts major. “He also conveys a historical perspective. The detectives we read about, beginning with Sherlock Holmes, are very different from traditional literary heroes. These are individuals who may not have risen to the highest levels of wealth and society, but they are men of reason and science who are invariably the smartest guys in the room.”
An initial concern of Tolan as he was planning the course was that “most of the authors come from Anglo or African-American backgrounds” and that that factor would limit the range of students who would be interested in the class. As it turns out, he found otherwise.
Outside the mainstream
“We actually have a broad diversity of students, all of whom look at detectives as outsider-heroes,” he says. Admittedly, the absence of multicultural themes in detective fiction sets it apart from most other contemporary fiction, “which is emblematic of people’s ethnic identities and lifestyles and gives voice to a country’s specific culture and values,” Tolan says. In discussing detective fiction, in contrast, “we wind up talking about the exoticism and eroticism of the detective and, ultimately, what it means to be a figure like the detective, who sometimes exists outside normal societal codes.”
Notwithstanding the detective’s position as an outsider, Alyse Dorcil, also a second-year liberal arts major, finds the readings peopled with characters “who I can relate to in one fashion or another—people who are interesting and exciting, but whom I wouldn’t normally think of as heroes.” For that matter, Dorcil doesn’t think of Tolan as “your average English literature teacher.”
“He really takes the time and effort to relate what we’re reading to our everyday lives,” she says.
