Anti-Detective Novels

Defined by William Spanos as “the paradigmatic archetype of the postmodern literary imagination,” the anti-detective novel has the formal purpose of evoking the impulse to ‘detect’. This is, however, violently frustrated by rejecting the solution of the crime, thus destroying the typical expectations of the traditional detective novel that reflect the positivist intellect (Gatti 36-37). According to the American critic Brian McHale, the anti-detective novel inverts, suppresses and obstructs elements of the detective novel such as the crime, the victim and the detective, thus destroying its own rationality (McHale 150-151, cited in Gatti 37). According to this defining framework, I follow Stefano Tani's taxonomy when I place Paul Auster's story, Locked Room ( ) within the category of anti-detective novel of metafiction and of a deconstructive type as opposed to the innovative novel type. While in the innovative type of story the rules of the classic detective novel are not totally subverted, since the pieces succeed in reconstructing the puzzle, in the deconstructive type reality is perceived as an endless number of clues in which the detective risks his sanity in trying to find a solution. In a frustrated outcome both detective and reader are They are faced with a rationally improbable-impossible solution or with total ignorance after an exhaustive pursuit or search in pursuit of solving the mystery (Gatti 37). In the metafictional novel, according to Tani, the detective, who has the function of reader, must solve the conspiracies of the author who becomes the manipulator of a world that he admits or suggests to have built while undermining it through his own self-referential interruptions. The central focus of the metafictional anti-detective novel is no longer the mystery or its deciphering but the search, the author's sleight of hand, the frustrating quality of mystery, the distancing from the rational reconstruction of an univocal truth and the inexplicable nature of reality (Gatti 37).

This chapter approaches police records as a genre that gains from being considered in its relationships with other genres of writing. In particular, we will follow its long-standing relationship to detective fiction, the novel, and biography. Going further, the chapter em phasizes the intermedia character of police records not just in our time but also through out their existence, indeed from their very origins. This approach opens to a more inclu sive media history of police files. We will start with an analysis of the seminal late nine teenth-century French manuals prescribing the writing of a police file, the famous Bertillon-method manuals. We will then track their influence following their adoption na tionally and internationally, with particular attention to the politics of their adoption in the colonies. We will also touch briefly on the relationship of early policing to other disci plines, such as anthropology and statistics, before moving to a closer look at its intersec tions with photography and literature.

DOI: 10.36253/978-88-5518-604-9
Partendo da una nozione storicamente e culturalmente determinata di allegoria, il volume indaga la presenza di una chiara istanza allegorica nelle ‘scritture di ricerca’ del secondo Novecento italiano; istanza che, citando Luperini, agisce al contempo come forma «di autocoscienza dell’arte nell’età moderna» e atto di «demistificazione critica». Seguendo questi due assi concettuali, il volume procede coniugando la discussione critico-teorica sull’allegoria moderna a puntuali analisi testuali, soffermandosi in particolare sulla produzione in prosa di Manganelli, Morselli, Volponi, Malerba, Arbasino, Sanguineti e Di Marco. Nelle opere prese in esame la funzione allegorica non si esplica solo attraverso il piano contenutistico; si traduce, piuttosto, nel modo di formare, orientando le scelte autoriali a livello della diegesi, delle strutture, dei rapporti con generi e modelli della tradizione. Si dispiega, così, quella trama disegnata dall’allegoria, principio strutturante dell’opera intera e garante del suo ineliminabile rapporto con il piano della storia – di cui la letteratura, con deformato realismo, esibisce conflitti e tensioni.

This article analyzes the development of noir genre in Inherent Vice written by Thomas Pynchon in 2009. In fact, this novel seems to be a time of reflection about all shifts and changes of detective fiction, starting from the Californian hard-boiled school and the postmodern anti-detective fiction to the contemporary noir. In Inherent Vice Pyn-chon shows his awareness and considerations about the genre tradition to which some of his novels such as The Crying of Lot 49 belong playing out a thought-provoking parodic representation of the detective story and its doom. This paper aims to decrypt the meaning of the references that Inherent Vice contains about noir genre and to detect what is the position of the author in writing this novel.

Peter Ackroyd's 'Hawksmoor' (1985) tells two stories in alternating chapters: one set in London between 1711 and 1715, the other in present-day London. In the first story, a murderous architect beholden to occult beliefs relates his exploits and situates them within his project of subverting the Enlightenment agenda of his superiors; in the second story, told by an apparently objective third-person narrator, the detective Nicholas Hawksmoor is baffled by a series of bizarre murders. The text’s two loci in time mark, respectively, the early days of modernity, in which science and rationality appeared to herald a brighter future, and late modernity, in which this optimism has come under question. The detective, who embodies the rationalist ethos and the tenet of scientific progress, emerges as a figure whose failure casts doubt upon the validity of the core beliefs of Western culture. Peter Ackroyd’s text is an original example of the sub-genre known as the ‘anti-detective narrative.’

Source:  Abriendo caminos. La literatura española desde 1975, edición a cargo de Dieter Ingenschay y Hans-Jörg Neuschäfer. Barcelona, Editoria Lumen 1994, S. 245-254.

Vázquez Montalbáns Carvalho series and her analisis of spanish transition

Ernst Jünger’s detective novel 'Eine gefährliche Begegnung' (1985) dramatizes a clash between the concept of adventure and the principles of order and modern scientific inquiry. Set in Paris, in 1888, the text tells the story of a murder investigation. Two adventurers embody, respectively, adventure’s origins in medieval chivalry and adventure’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century form of colonial exploration; the detective embodies nineteenth-century advances in applied science as well as modern anthropological and psychological theories. Jünger’s narrative engages with defining nineteenth-century texts, such as Bertillon’s writings on anthropometric identification, Cesare Lombroso’s theories on the nature of the criminal, and Gustave Le Bon’s analysis of mass psychology. These texts articulate a rationalist ethos, advocated in Jünger’s novel by the detective. The opposing principles of unregulated individual freedom and a fanciful code of honor, embodied by the adventurers, are depicted as relics of a bygone age, whose passing can only be lamented, not remedied.

How to read Walter Benjamin today? This book argues that the proper way is through an approach which recognizes and respects his own peculiar theorization of the act of reading and the politics of interpretation that this entails. The approach must be figural, that is, focused on images, and driven by the notion of actualization. Figural reading, in the very sui generis Benjaminian way, understands figures as constellations, whereby an image of the past juxtaposes them with an image of the present and is thus actualized. To apply this method to Benjamin's own work means first to identify some figures. The book singles out the Flâneur, the Detective, the Prostitute and the Ragpicker, and then sets them alongside a contemporary account of the same figure: the Flâneur in Juan Goytisolo's Landscapes after the Battle (1982), the Detective in Paul Auster's New York Trilogy (1987), the Prostitute in Dacia Maraini's Dialogue between a Prostitute and her Client (1973), and the Ragpicker in Mudrooroo's The Mudrooroo/Mu ller Project (1993). The book thereby, on the one hand, analyses the politics of reading Benjamin today and, on the other, sets his work against a variety of contemporary aesthetics and politics of interpretation.

The turn of the century was marked by a climate of change and progress, where positivism and scientific approaches led to criminological discourse legitimacy. This paper addresses the way in which science and narrative flawlessly merge in Eduardo Holmberg's novel, La Bolsa de Huesos, to constitute the foundational scene of what will become a paradigmatic representation of the female criminal in Latin American literature. The representational paradigm I am suggesting operates in fictional accounts of criminal women in which the detective of the story deprives the female offender of the active power she exercised upon her victim(s) through symbolic domination. The once powerful female assassin is developed into a victim of her own psychological instabilities, and the detective will ultimately enjoy the aesthetic authorship and power the female murderer was after. In 1893 the founder of the Italian School of Positivist Criminology, Cesare Lombroso, published La donna delinquente, la prostitute e la donna normale. Translated as The Female Offender in 1895 it introduced both British and American 1 readers to a criminal anthropology that tackled the study of the body, mind and habits of a new sort of criminal: the born criminal. According to Lombroso, women are prone to innate psychiatric instabilities that reside deep within their biological constitution. The female becomes a criminal when she violates moral codes and threatens the constitution -and continuation-of a healthy society 2 . Lombroso's theory breaks ties with the classical school 3 of criminology's fundamental principle, which stated that the treatment of a criminal should be determined by the character of the crime committed 4 . What Lombroso proposes