Minor Literature and Minor Form: The Case of The Chinese Detective

Abstract

“Minor forms” of literature (in this case the detective story) are far from unimportant to literary history. Gilles DeLeuze and Félix Guattari show us in their treatment of Franz Kafka as a writer with a complex relationship to literature both major and minor that writers who conceive of themselves as minority voices take on an echo chamber of obligations that complicate their work. When the work they intend to produce is also perceived to be “minor” (e.g. the detective novel), echoes multiply. Two entwined cases are explored here: Earl Derr Biggers’s series of Charlie Chan detective novels of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and Henry Chang’s five-novel series of Jack Yu novels of the early twenty-first century. Issues of ethnicity, cultural expropriation, exilic melancholy enrich and transform their works in a “minor form.”