Intersubjective politeness in a Charlie Chan detective story : a case of intercultural faceWork

Introduction Crime fiction is one of the world’s most popular genres. Indeed, it has been estimated that as many as one in every three new novels, published in English, is classified within the crime fiction category (Knight xi). These new entrants to the market are forced to jostle for space on bookstore and library shelves with reprints of classic crime novels; such works placed in, often fierce, competition against their contemporaries as well as many of their predecessors. Raymond Chandler, in his well-known essay The Simple Art of Murder, noted Ernest Hemingway’s observation that “the good writer competes only with the dead. The good detective story writer […] competes not only with all the unburied dead but with all the hosts of the living as well” (3). In fact, there are so many examples of crime fiction works that, as early as the 1920s, one of the original ‘Queens of Crime’, Dorothy L. Sayers, complained: It is impossible to keep track of all the detective-stories produced to-day [sic]. Book upon book, magazine upon magazine pour out from the Press, crammed with murders, thefts, arsons, frauds, conspiracies, problems, puzzles, mysteries, thrills, maniacs, crooks, poisoners, forgers, garrotters, police, spies, secret-service men, detectives, until it seems that half the world must be engaged in setting riddles for the other half to solve (95). Twenty years after Sayers wrote on the matter of the vast quantities of crime fiction available, W.H. Auden wrote one of the more famous essays on the genre: The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict. Auden is, perhaps, better known as a poet but his connection to the crime fiction genre is undisputed. As well as his poetic works that reference crime fiction and commentaries on crime fiction, one of Auden’s fellow poets, Cecil Day-Lewis, wrote a series of crime fiction novels under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake: the central protagonist of these novels, Nigel Strangeways, was modelled upon Auden (Scaggs 27). Interestingly, some writers whose names are now synonymous with the genre, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler, established the link between poetry and crime fiction many years before the publication of The Guilty Vicarage. Edmund Wilson suggested that “reading detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking” (395). In the first line of The Guilty Vicarage, Auden supports Wilson’s claim and confesses that: “For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol” (406). This indicates that the genre is at best a trivial pursuit, at worst a pursuit that is bad for your health and is, increasingly, socially unacceptable, while Auden’s ideas around taste—high and low—are made clear when he declares that “detective stories have nothing to do with works of art” (406). The debates that surround genre and taste are many and varied. The mid-1920s was a point in time which had witnessed crime fiction writers produce some of the finest examples of fiction to ever be published and when readers and publishers were watching, with anticipation, as a new generation of crime fiction writers were readying themselves to enter what would become known as the genre’s Golden Age. At this time, R. Austin Freeman wrote that: By the critic and the professedly literary person the detective story is apt to be dismissed contemptuously as outside the pale of literature, to be conceived of as a type of work produced by half-educated and wholly incompetent writers for consumption by office boys, factory girls, and other persons devoid of culture and literary taste (7). This article responds to Auden’s essay and explores how crime fiction appeals to many different tastes: tastes that are acquired, change over time, are embraced, or kept as guilty secrets. In addition, this article will challenge Auden’s very narrow definition of crime fiction and suggest how Auden’s religious imagery, deployed to explain why many people choose to read crime fiction, can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment. This latter argument demonstrates that a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. Crime Fiction: A Type For Every Taste Cathy Cole has observed that “crime novels are housed in their own section in many bookshops, separated from literary novels much as you’d keep a child with measles away from the rest of the class” (116). Times have changed. So too, have our tastes. Crime fiction, once sequestered in corners, now demands vast tracts of prime real estate in bookstores allowing readers to “make their way to the appropriate shelves, and begin to browse […] sorting through a wide variety of very different types of novels” (Malmgren 115). This is a result of the sheer size of the genre, noted above, as well as the genre’s expanding scope. Indeed, those who worked to re-invent crime fiction in the 1800s could not have envisaged the “taxonomic exuberance” (Derrida 206) of the writers who have defined crime fiction sub-genres, as well as how readers would respond by not only wanting to read crime fiction but also wanting to read many different types of crime fiction tailored to their particular tastes. To understand the demand for this diversity, it is important to reflect upon some of the appeal factors of crime fiction for readers. Many rules have been promulgated for the writers of crime fiction to follow. Ronald Knox produced a set of 10 rules in 1928. These included Rule 3 “Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable”, and Rule 10 “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them” (194–6). In the same year, S.S. Van Dine produced another list of 20 rules, which included Rule 3 “There must be no love interest: The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar”, and Rule 7 “There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better” (189–93). Some of these directives have been deliberately ignored or have become out-of-date over time while others continue to be followed in contemporary crime writing practice. In sharp contrast, there are no rules for reading this genre. Individuals are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction. There are, however, different appeal factors for readers. The most common of these appeal factors, often described as doorways, are story, setting, character, and language. As the following passage explains: The story doorway beckons those who enjoy reading to find out what happens next. The setting doorway opens widest for readers who enjoy being immersed in an evocation of place or time. The doorway of character is for readers who enjoy looking at the world through others’ eyes. Readers who most appreciate skilful writing enter through the doorway of language (Wyatt online). These doorways draw readers to the crime fiction genre. There are stories that allow us to easily predict what will come next or make us hold our breath until the very last page, the books that we will cheerfully lend to a family member or a friend and those that we keep close to hand to re-read again and again. There are settings as diverse as country manors, exotic locations, and familiar city streets, places we have been and others that we might want to explore. There are characters such as the accidental sleuth, the hardboiled detective, and the refined police officer, amongst many others, the men and women—complete with idiosyncrasies and flaws—who we have grown to admire and trust. There is also the language that all writers, regardless of genre, depend upon to tell their tales. In crime fiction, even the most basic task of describing where the murder victim was found can range from words that convey the genteel—“The room of the tragedy” (Christie 62)—to the absurd: “There it was, jammed between a pallet load of best export boneless beef and half a tonne of spring lamb” (Maloney 1). These appeal factors indicate why readers might choose crime fiction over another genre, or choose one type of crime fiction over another. Yet such factors fail to explain what crime fiction is or adequately answer why the genre is devoured in such vast quantities. Firstly, crime fiction stories are those in which there is the committing of a crime, or at least the suspicion of a crime (Cole), and the story that unfolds revolves around the efforts of an amateur or professional detective to solve that crime (Scaggs). Secondly, crime fiction offers the reassurance of resolution, a guarantee that from “previous experience and from certain cultural conventions associated with this genre that ultimately the mystery will be fully explained” (Zunshine 122). For Auden, the definition of the crime novel was quite specific, and he argued that referring to the genre by “the vulgar definition, ‘a Whodunit’ is correct” (407). Auden went on to offer a basic formula stating that: “a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies” (407). The idea of a formula is certainly a useful one, particularly when production demands—in terms of both quality and quantity—are so high, because the formula facilitates creators in the “rapid and efficient production of new works” (Cawelti 9). For contemporary crime fiction readers, the doorways to reading, discussed briefly above, have been cast wide open. Stories relying upon the basic crime fiction formula as a foundation can be gothic tales, clue puzzles, forensic procedurals, spy thrillers, hardboiled narratives, or violent crime narratives, amongst many others. The settings can be quiet villages or busy metropolises, landscapes that readers actually inhabit or that provide a form

NE of the few unsolved mysteries in the Yale Catalogue of ~aJ Gertrude Stein's writings concerns the existence of an item possibly written in I933 and titled Story. Whether the piece actually exists as more than a title is in doubt. What is not in doubt is that Stein spent much of her life thinking about writing just such a story and reading detective written by others. In Everybody's Autobiography, Stein declares that detective are the only puzzles that interest her, explaining that her concern really lies in somebody being dead and how it moves along.1 are what I can read, she grandly announced, and read them she did, often several in a week.2 Stein even bemoaned their scarcity, noting that you want to read one a day well not one a day but one every other day, say three a week and if you are willing to read over and over a lot of them even then there are not enough to go around. . . Whether or not Stein ever wrote Story, she did write a short play, Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters, a curious 8o-page short novel, Blood On the Dining-Room Floor, an impenetrable thirty-page piece enigmatically titled Subject Cases: The Background of a Detective Story, and several other short works with detective themes or subjects. Her thoughts about detective fiction or crime stories appear in each of her explanatory works, and Everybody's Autobiography and The Geographical History of America seem almost obsessively concerned with detective stories. Stein scholars have acknowledged this interest of hers, but have

<p>Comparative literary studies show that the detective genre today is one of the most popular genres of literature. This piece is an attempt to explore the detective story genre boundaries and ascertain attributes of this genre in the novel “A Secret History” by Donna Tartt. Today, detective literature provokes interest not only with readers, but also with literary critics. The research of works of the detective genre is carried out by such scientists as M.A.Bondarenko, M.Butor, I.V.Belozerova, S.Zizek, and many others; they investigate various aspects of detective literature: the place of literary pieces of the detective genre in mass and elite literature, engage in the development of typology of genres and subgenres, etc. The inverted detective story (another name is “howcatchim” is a detective story, mystery story, where the crime is delivered to the reader in the beginning of a story, and the identity of the perpetrator is usually shown to the reader as well. This is a story, where the reader has the advantage compare to the sleuth. There may also be subsidiary puzzles, such as why the crime was committed, but those are cleared up along the way. This format is the opposite of the more typical “whodunit”, where all of the details of the perpetrator of the crime are not revealed until the story’s climax. “A Secret History” by Donna Tartt deals with a number of issues that lie beyond the characteristics of any detective story. It deals with philosophical matters, with the eternal, sublime things. Some of those things are loss of self, control, horror; sublime and divine, etc. “A Secret History” by Donna Tartt, though possessing attributes of the detective story, namely an inverted detective story, due to the murder introduction in the beginning of narrative lacks main features of the detective story. It may structurally look like one, though it is not such in essence. The novel lacks a protagonist detective and antagonist detective, investigation process, evidence gathering, just or unjust sentence, perpetrators identity uncovering. One of the most significant features of a protagonist of the detective story is to be a hero (the definition of being hero may vary) and bring justice, which is not the case in Tartt’s novel.</p>

In Ways of Escape Graham Greene says that while he began Rock in 1937 as a detective first fifty pages . . . are all that remain of the detective story and that they would have been removed if he had had the strength of mind to do so (WE 58, 60). However, there is something disingenuous about this claim, since the structure of the detective is woven into the fabric of the novel and cannot be taken out with the surgical removal of a fixed number of pages. Whatever Greene may say, though it is many other things, is also a detective story. Like the detective story, which as Tzvetan Todorov and others note is a of reading and interpretation, Rock makes reading a principal theme and so comments on how it is to be read. Within the narrative, scenes of reading abound while the residual structure of the detective contains these within a larger interpretive frame that is the detective's investigation of a criminal's fictions. These thematic and structural concerns raise a number of points about reading in general and, by extension, about how critics have usually approached the novel. Like the stick of candy that gives the book its title and can be broken at any point to reveal its name Brighton Rock, the novel, no matter where we look in it, always presents the critic with his or her own activity of reading and interpreting. The following discussion examines some of the critical issues that emerge from the critique of various reading strategies that the novel inscribes. By considering the narrative's handling of the detective-story plot, I hope to cast the novel in a new light and to expand the range of critical approaches that can be brought to bear on the text. Central to the novel's presentation of interpretive issues is the character of Ida Arnold, who functions in a role analogous to the detective in classical detective stories such as those by Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, or Dorothy Sayers. Ida is the amateur investigator whose self-appointed task is to sift various clues and statements of witnesses for information that will help her to construct a true account of Hale's death. She, in fact, reads and interprets others' texts so that she can produce a narrative which is the of what happened to Hale; and in this way she is also a figure analogous to the reader or critic of Rock who sifts the text for meaning in order to develop his or her own interpretation of the text. In Rock it is quickly made clear that Hale's death is in some way precipitated by Pinkie's gang, though how they do this remains unclear throughout the novel. As the opens, Fred Hale, fearing for his life, strikes up an acquaintance with Ida Arnold, a fun-loving, pragmatic woman who repeatedly insists on her knowledge of the difference between right and wrong. After Hale's death, Ida begins her own investigation in order to bring Pinkie to justice and to save Rose the suffering that Pinkie will inflict upon her. As well, Ida sees her quest as a chance to have a bit of fun (37). Also quickly apparent to the reader acquainted with detective stories is that Rock's narration treats Ida in quite a different manner from the way more orthodox detective stories treat their great detectives such as Dupin, Holmes, Poirot, Wimsey, or even Miss Marple. These characters are a part of Ida's lineage, yet, unlike them in their respective narratives, Ida is mocked by the narrative in which she appears: her understanding of the case and of the world she inhabits is clearly shown to be limited by her inability to see beneath the surface of things. for her is a place of fun and excitement, and life, though she takes it with deadly seriousness (36), is always good (19, 72), made up as it is for her with various physical sensations and corporal pleasures: Life was sunlight on brass bedposts, Ruby port, the leap of the heart when the outsider you have backed passes the post and the colours go bobbing up. …

REVIEWS625 Disorderly discourse: Narrative, conflict, and inequality. Ed. by Charles L. Briggs. (Oxford studies in anthropological linguistics, 7). New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. ii, 248. $49.95. Reviewed by James Stanlaw, Illinois State University Most anthropologists and linguists would agree that narratives are critical devices that can be used to establish social organization, convey values, reify power structures, and solve disputes. Few would also deny that conflict, on any number of levels, is part of our daily lives. But as Charles Briggs, the editor of this volume, says, conflict and narrative have usually been treated in relative isolation (3). This collection of essays—which grew out of a special session of the American Ethnological Association meetings in 1988—is an attempt to examine them together linguistically in an ethnographic context. In a long introduction, B sets a theoretical grounding for how narrative might sustain, create, and mediate conflict. In essence, this is a review essay of about 175 sources examining most of the critical literature through about 1994. But more than that, B, in lucid detail, discusses how ideology articulates with hegemony, how power meets with resistance, as well as how symbols, icons, and indexes operate in discourse and metadiscursive practices. The logic behind why the following eight papers are presented is clearly stated. The book's first chapter is Donald Brenneis's discussion of conflict resolution using talanoa 'gossip' and pancayat 'mediation' in an East Indian community in the Fiji Islands. The former is raucous, quick, and entertaining while the later is staid, formal, and deliberate. Gossip holds people together through a kind of friendship diat is often difficult to achieve in this 'perilously flexible social world' (47) while formal mediation sessions reinforce the egalitarian sense of community where everyone has the right to have their say. Besides helping to resolve specific disputes, these two narrative devices extol culturally salient models of discourse and behavior. In the second article, Ellen Basso examines Taugi, me trickster figure of me Kalapalo of central Brazil. Tricksters—who are both mythological culture heroes and clowns who violate the most sacred of social taboos—are found throughout the world's societies, particularly in indigenous America. They have long been objects of fascination for anthropologists and psychoanalysts alike. By considering tricksters as 'narrativized selves' (54) we can see how Taugi creates his ambiguous persona through his self-referential discourse (by such means as not using evidential particles in his speech). In the book's third chapter, Michael Herzfeld discusses the creation of 'honor among thieves' in a society of sheep-poachers. He explores a number of narrative and linguistic devices some highland villagers in Crete use to suggest that they have no choice but to resort to thievery, even though they may be quite cognizant of the legal and moral sanctions they have violated. This moral ambiguity is compounded when two moral codes—that of the village and that of the nation-state (which share a partially common rhetoric)—can be played off one another. The fourth entry takes us to that most exotic of field sites, the American dinner table. In this article, Elinor Ochs, Ruth Smith, and Carolyn Taylor describe the kind of talk that often occurs between parents and children over the evening meal as the events of the day are related to other family members. One particular form of discourse—what the authors call 'detective stories'—is seen as being 'co-narrated' by both speaker and listeners. A detective story here is one where some participants feel there is missing information critical to the plot or the motivation of the characters. In Lieutenant Columbo-like fashion, an interrogator may persist in seeking information beyond the initial version of the story, which (at least in some sense) could be considered already complete. For instance, in one example given, a young girl describes her incredulity at a classmate only getting a detention for an infraction (lifting up her dress in front of the boys) that she felt should have merited at least a suspension. However, on closer questioning by her brother, it turns out the girl has also had a detention in the past—a fact that for obvious reasons...

Plot, the ―sequence of interrelated events‖ (Foster in Pickering and Hoeper 1981:14), is a building element of literary works. This literary element assists in text reading and interpretation processes because the element shows the sequences of interrelated events that help in understanding text development. In the processes of text reading and text interpretation, plot is commonly analyzed literarily with the specific concern only to the elemental sequences of a plot. The concern to the sequences makes the plot analysis as the description of a certain construction, a text structure. Actually, plot analysis could also be conducted linguistically by analyzing certain linguistic elements and the contribution of these linguistic elements to plot description, as discussed in stylistics. The appearances of the stylistic and structural methods require two analysis types: the linguistic and the literary analyses. The stylistic method covers the linguistic analyses of the lexical items and their semantic sense relations, and the structural method covers a literary discussion on the plot sequences of the three texts. The linguistic based and literary based analyses are interrelated each other by the description of the semantic sense relations of the chosen lexical items in order to describe the sequencing of the texts‘ plot. Based on the analysis, the three Doyle‘s detective short stories are built from similar plot sequences. Each sequence is also composed from some other similar features which are arranged in a similar chronology. In summary, three plot sequences –exposition, action and climax— are built from two main features, and the other two plot sequences –resolution and conclusion— are developed by three composing features. Exposition consists of the narrative of a pre undisturbed situation and the narrative of the crime. Action consists of the deducting efforts prior to the crime scene investigation and the described actions taken during the crime scene investigation. Climax is the revelation of the tools used in the murders and the murderers themselves. Resolution shows the crime solving by mentioning the relationship of the information in the introduction, particularly the second part, and the actions taken in the Action. Conclusion ends the stories by stating punishment for the guilty murderers, the reward for the victims or the falsely accused participants and the common conclusion for public consumption. Among the five, a close similarity is seen in three plot sequences: exposition, action and resolution. Their relation is proven by the similar lexical items used in the features of the three plot sequences. The similarity causes a linkage of logics of a detective story.

Detective stories and novels draw the attention of a wide array of readers. These were mouth- watering prospects whenever being catered to its readers and audiences over the decades. However, if we could go back through the time machine, we would see that late 18th and later half of 19th century developed the foundation of such kind of fictions and not to mention, afterward, detective fictions progressed leaps and bounds, as it rampaged its authority on the English literature. Although such stories are considered as potential crowd pullers but above all, if we intricate such stories and novels in depth, we would be able to see a sizeable reflection of 19th century Victorian Age and its social perspectives. Therefore, in this essay, we would like to emphasize primarily to illustrate the socio-economy of Victorian Era, in relevance to the contribution of detective fiction stories and novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Article visualizations:

Unzuverlässiges Erzählen als werkübergreifende Kategorie. Personale und impersonale Erzählinstanzen im phantastischen Kriminalroman

The influence of Edgar Allan Poe on North American culture and literature is still a subject of debate in contemporary literary theory. However, Poe’s creative legacy regarding the writings of Miriam Allen Deford remains neglected by the literary critics. Deford’s fiction explored a set of literary genres, such as biography, science fiction, crime and detective short stories. Taking these premises as a point of departure, this article aims to identify similarities between “A Death in the Family” and some of Poe’s works. Drawing on studies by J. T. Irwin, James M. Hutchisson and others, the objective of this paper is to analyze passages from Deford’s tale in comparison with the poetry and fictional prose of Poe. The analysis suggests that Deford’s horror short story “A Death in the Family,” published in 1961, was mostly inspired by Poe’s gothic tales, detective stories, and poems.

The role played by translation during the late Qing period has been highlighted in much recent research, and the translation of detective stories is of course not a new area of academic inquiry. The difference between Chinese Gong'an (court case) and Western detective stories in particular has been acknowledged, and the Chinese translation of detective stories merits further research and inquiry. Actually, Western detective stories, especially English ones, are fraught with advanced science and technology and thus considered as miniature of modernity. In lieu of this, we can observe the interest in the relationship between detective stories and the rise of forensic science, Western medicine, and photographic technology in particular. Given the discrepancy between Western medicine and Traditional Chinese Medicine, it is indispensable to answer the following questions: How was the Western medicine perceived and translated into the Hong Kong context? How was photographic technology in foreign detective stories understood and applied in local writing, pseudo translation to be specific? This article will focus on several aspects of Western medicine, medical terms, symptoms of disease, treatment, and forensic toxicology. The (mis)understanding/manipulation of photographic technology in pseudo translation will also be examined. Case studies will cover the translations in the early Chinese newspapers in Hong Kong in the beginning decade of the twentieth century.

"From the detective story, considered a literary sub-genre, to the present-day detective story, the evolution of the detective story shows to what extent this genre has been able to consolidate itself. In its evolution, it has been able to go beyond the limits to assert itself, showing at the same time that the detective story offers a variety of openings to tackle all kinds of subjects. At present, the historical detective story is enjoying enormous success and, based on Hervé Le Corre’s novel L’homme aux lèvres de saphir, we will show that the detective story goes beyond the limits and generic labels. However, the disappearance of boundaries leads to a new debate, since detective novel readers are not targeted by the novels. "

streets were dark with something more than night. (Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder 13) Black narrative writing in America often employs a detective-like protagonist struggling against an evil society - as Theodore O. Mason, Jr., points out (182) - yet, curiously, detective fiction itself is a genre that has attracted few writers (most notably, in decades past, Rudolph Fisher and Chester Himes). In Mosley's four L.A. detective novels, he joins small cohort of detective fiction writers, apparently as part of a radical project to enter mostly white, male, and conservative populist terrain of American detective fiction. At same time, however, Mosley's often uncritical use of traditional hard-boiled detective formula seems to work against this project by employing a detective narrator in a previously invisible textual location - Los Angeles. Indeed, there is a tension between Mosley's subject and his method, and this tension prompts my basic question about Mosley's L.A. novels: Are they - with use of a narrator, characters, and locations - authentically transgressive texts, or are they discursively subsumed under detective story formula (and especially L.A. detective fiction paradigm, as constructed by Chandler) and do they come, thus, to represent at best nostalgic traces of hardboiled tradition? In other words, are novels merely exotic versions of American detective story, as opposed to subversive texts? My answer to these questions is an Ellisonian yes and no. In terms of use of characters and locations - and also in terms of generic violations of hardboiled detective story - Mosley's novels indeed function as texts of difference. Yet when they deploy Chandlerian hardboiled detective and ultimately embrace essentially conservative thematics of L.A. detective story, Mosley's novels mute subversiveness and reinforce reassuring quality of formulaic detective fiction. In this light, I will read Mosley's novels as metacritical allegories that reflect a fundamental ambivalence about his own intervention into white (detective) discourse. Two recent essays on detective fiction decisively argue in favor of a discursive difference in texts like Mosley's L.A. novels. In Chandler Comes to Harlem: Racial Politics in Thrillers of Chester Himes, Peter J. Rabinowitz argues that Himes could not just imitate hardboiled novels and, as Himes claims, simply make the face black in his detective novels. Instead, Rabinowitz insists, Chandlerian notion of a self-contained integrity and noir heroism is unavailable to Himes's detectives inasmuch as their situation . . . is inextricably tied up in racial politics (22).(1) In another essay, Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins: Detective and Afro-American Fiction, Theodore O. Mason, Jr., similarly argues that, despite his use of detective genre, Mosley breaks with traditional white detective story through oppositional use of subject matter. Even more, Mason contends that Easy Rawlins discovers inadequacy of assumed cultural knowledge - especially about race and sexuality - in construction of self in a racist and sexist society, and thus joins other protagonists (like Milkman in Morrison's Song of Solomon and Papa LaBas in Reed's Mumbo Jumbo) who similarly recognize constructed nature of identity in a racist society. Although Rabinowitz and Mason offer strong arguments in favor of a transgressive detective fiction, both ultimately tell only part of story, for they ignore way in which story and detective in Himes's and Mosley's novels reflect traditional hardboiled detective fiction. Despite Mosley's counter-discursive deployment of a protagonist, his L.A. detective novels reinforce conservative values of traditional American detective fiction. While (as in Chandler) Mosley's Rawlins moves through a world in which white politicians, businessmen, and cops - as well as community leaders - are all corrupt, his novels never put the law itself . …

Los relatos policiales de Víctor Juan Guillot han sido hasta aquí completamente ignorados por la crítica literaria y la historiografía del género policial en la Argentina. Sostenemos que en estos relatos de Guillot puede advertirse el pasaje desde un modelo de relato policial –aquel que sería el fundamental desde fines de la década de 1870 hasta aproximadamente 1930, con claros aspectos folletinescos y vínculos estrechos con la realidad política y social– hacia una narración detectivesca más cercana al modelo de la Edad de Oro del policial en lengua inglesa y más alejado de la vida empírica nacional. Este último tipo de policial se desarrollará con vigor durante las décadas de 1930 y 1940. En este sentido, mostramos en qué medida los relatos policiales de los libros Historias sin importancia (1920) y El alma en el pozo (1925) consuenan con la tradición temprana del género en la Argentina, mientras que los cuentos incluidos en Terror: cuentos rojos y negros (circa 1935) se hallan en sintonía con los policiales de la década de 1930. Asimismo, exhibimos de qué manera las concepciones de Guillot –expresadas en la poética de sus relatos y también en reflexiones sobre la novela policial– anticipan ya desde 1925 las ideas de Jorge Luis Borges sobre lo policial durante los años 30. Palabras clave: Víctor Guillot; Novela policial; Literatura argentina; siglo XX; Jorge Luis Borges

"A la pinche modernidad"Literary Form and the End of History in Roberto Bolaño's Los detectives salvajes Emilio Sauri Click for larger view View full resolution Roberto Bolaño, Los detectives salvajes "Soñábamos con utopía y nos despertamos gritando." Roberto Bolaño, "Déjenlo todo, nuevamente" I. The Aesthetic Event In a lecture entitled "El cuento policial" ["The Detective Story" (1978)], Jorge Luis Borges observes that, "The detective novel has created a special type of reader," and adds, "If Poe created the detective story, he subsequently created the reader of detective fiction" (492). Borges's interest in this particular genre, of course, inspired a good deal of his own fictions, though what his remarks will point to here is a more generalizable concept of literature that entails a certain notion of the relationship between reader and text. For Borges, this "special type of reader" confronts literature with such "incredulity and suspicions" that he or she might turn any narrative into a detective story; if "told [End Page 406] that Don Quixote is a detective novel," this reader, he contends, will invariably conclude that, "Cervantes was the murderer, the guilty party" (492). Yet, what Borges describes is neither a reader who is liable to a misinterpretation of Cervantes's novel, nor simply some understanding of detective fiction in the sense of literary history or genres. Rather, his account draws our attention to what appears to be an insight into the general ontology of literature that detective fiction provides. For what literature is, according to Borges, is "an aesthetic event" that "requires the conjunction of reader and text" (491); and what the detective story highlights, he suggests, is the way in which the reader—any reader—forms the conditions of possibility for this "aesthetic event." Arguing that, "It is absurd to suppose that a book is much more than a book. It begins to exist when a reader opens it," Borges imagines that the participation of this reader is neither extrinsic nor secondary to but constitutive of the literary text. Thus, to the extent that the distinction between detective fiction and other kinds of fiction is afforded by "the way texts are read" (491)—rather than, say, a set of formal elements found within the work itself—the conceptualization of literary form implicit in this account ultimately requires an insistence on the primacy of this reader. Absent the "aesthetic event"—that is, this encounter between reader and text—the literary itself remains indefinable and indescribable. Borges subsequently maintains that the aesthetic "event" or "phenomenon" "can be similar to the moment when the book was created" (492); as such, the participation of the reader is assimilated to the role of the writer to suggest that both are equally constitutive of the text. For this reason, however, we might say that what is involved in the example of the reader who approaches Cervantes's seventeenth-century text as a detective novel is not so much a form of méconnaissance as it is a kind of rewriting of that same text. No doubt the somewhat paradoxical conclusions drawn from Borges's remarks are familiar to his own readers and critics alike. Nevertheless, what appears to be as a typical Borgesian anomaly finds a number of ready equivalents in Latin American literature since the 1960s, not least in Roberto Bolaño's Los detectives salvajes [The Savage Detectives (1998)]. That this novel and Bolaño's work more generally engage the conventional elements of detective fiction certainly offers a means toward explicating this continuity, although a more meaningful set of connections between these and other authors is made available by a shared understanding of what literature is. Indeed, it is the exhaustion of this same conception of the literary that is dramatized, [End Page 407] this essay argues, in Los detectives salvajes, a novel in which both the story of a fictional band of poets known as the visceral realists and the history of literary modernism ends in the Sonora Desert in 1976. And as we will see, this exhaustion was precipitated by a continuing crisis in the production of global wealth that has not only had the profoundest consequences for...

The following text is from my book Teoria della conoscenza published by Laterza some years ago. I have chosen to offer it here, in memory of my friend and colleague Flavio Baroncelli, for three basic reasons. First of all, more than twenty years ago, Flavio offered to be the supervisor of my graduate thesis on an epistemological theme in modern philosophy. I have not forgotten that possibility and have in recent times come to reflect upon both the type of epistemology and the philosophers that were beloved by Flavio. The text which follows these introductory remarks is a testament to this. Secondly, when he knew that I was interested in the epistemology of testimony, Flavio urged me to go on, because of the importance of that topic not only for general epistemology, but also for many other branches of philosophy. Thirdly, on the occasion of the publication of Teoria della conoscenza, Flavio participated on the round table in which it was presented to the public and had something like this to say: "I read the whole book with the same breath, as it was a detective story". In his memory, I cannot but hope to write other "detective stories".