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Detective Fiction on the Case of Community uses one of the most popular forms of modern literature to examine one of modernity's most trenchant problems. The project rests on the argument that detective fiction emerges specifically from an awareness of the stress that modernization puts on the possibilities of communal life, as industrialization and urbanism accelerate the alienation and atomization we recognize as modern conditions. Here the detective appears as an image of thinking still able to perceive the threads that link such alienated people together, and therefore able to imagine solutions along the lines of these obscured connections. Reading the genre's journey, from its origins in Poe to its most unorthodox form in Pynchon, allows fresh perspectives on the possibilities and limits of modern community, from its endurance as part of modernization to its meaning today as a sticking point in theoretical debate and political activism.
List of contents
1. Introduction: The Mystery of the Vanishing Community
2. Investigations Begin: The Mystery and Promise of Analysis
Dupin and a Reimagining of the World
Sherlock Holmes, the Aesthetics of Mystery, and the Relations of Investigation
Conclusion: Fairy Tales of the Modern
3. Investigations Below: Latin American Detection and the Ecosophical Turn
Detective Fiction in the Latin American Literary Field
Borges Rewriting Poe
Borges' Literary Event and the Boom
Piglia and Detection as Ecosophical
Conclusion: Detection and the Politics of the Possible
4. Investigations Together: Pynchon's Detectives of Incommensurable Mystery
Immunization in The Crying of Lot 49
Vineland and the Belated Moment of Welcome to Planet Earth
Corrupt Pilgrims of Incommensurable Mystery
Conclusion: Being Nihilistic Together
5. Epilogue: Detecting the Genre in Action
Index
About the author
Devin Fromm is Resident Assistant Professor at Occidental College
Summary
It examines one of modernity’s most trenchant problems.The project rests on the argument that detective fiction emerges specifically from an awareness of the stress that modernization puts on the possibilities of communal life, as industrialization and urbanism accelerate the alienation and atomization we recognize as modern conditions
