When the call went out, about a generation ago, that the Western canon must be purged of its surfeit of “dead white males,” the cry was loudest in departments of English. (Why this should be so—why it is easier to rally a mob against Milton and Spenser, say, than Michelangelo and Mozart—has never been satisfactorily explained.) And it is more than ironic that that same canon has in the intervening years  been expanded to include someone who might be regarded as the double-distilled quintessence of the dead white male—that arch-brutalizer of women, Alfred Hitchcock—and that this should happen precisely in departments of English. In recent years, Hitchcock has been the subject of seminars and surveys throughout the country, almost all of them offered by English departments. A small selection might include “Theories of Authorship in the Cinema: Alfred Hitchcock” (Bryn Mawr); “Hitchcock: Cinema, Gender, Ideology” (Tufts); “Hitchcock in England and America” (Vanderbilt); “The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock” (University of Maryland); and a research seminar on “The Hitchcock Canon” (Berkeley).

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