Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism

by Patricia Merivale (Editor), Susan Elizabeth Sweeney (Editor)

Although readers of detective fiction ordinarily expect to learn the mystery's solution at the end, there is another kind of detective story—the history of which encompasses writers as diverse as Poe, Borges, Robbe-Grillet, Auster, and Stephen King—that ends with a question rather than an answer. The detective not only fails to solve the crime, but also confronts insoluble mysteries of interpretation and identity. As the contributors to Detecting Texts contend, such stories belong to a distinct genre, the "metaphysical detective story," in which the detective hero's inability to interpret the mystery inevitably casts doubt on the reader's similar attempt to make sense of the text and the world.

Detecting Texts includes an introduction by the editors that defines the metaphysical detective story and traces its history from Poe's classic tales to today's postmodernist experiments. In addition to the editors, contributors include Stephen Bernstein, Joel Black, John T. Irwin, Jeffrey T. Nealon, and others.

Genres: Nonfiction, Detective, Literary Criticism, Literature

320 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1998

Reviews

[Gabriel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fairly thorough anthology of essays dealing with the (embedded) hermeneutic possibilities of writing using generic (specifically detective fiction) constraints. The best essays are those that do not presuppose their own embedded texts: Irwin, Botta, Ewert, and Sirvent. Somewhat self-defeating, though, as it posits as its raison d'etre the detective generic trope in modern and postmodern fiction (with the exception really of only Poe, despite the editors' protests), but deals quite extensively with works that only marginally claim those constraints. Still, for all of its shortcomings, a good introduction to several different styles of approach to the hermeneutics of (post)modern fiction, and to the postmodern project as a whole.