scholarly journals The Labyrinth and the Non-Solution: Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase and the Metaphysical Detective

MANUSYA ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-89
Author(s):  
Rhys William Tyers
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Search For Meaning ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Raymond Chandler ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Guiding Principle ◽  
Wild Sheep ◽  
Detective Stories ◽  
Definition Of

Many of Murakami’s novels demonstrate his appropriation of the terminology, imagery and metaphor that are found in hardboiled detective fiction. The question of Haruki Murakami’s use of the tropes from hardboiled detective stories has been discussed by scholars such as Hantke (2007), Stretcher (2002) and Suter (2008), who argue that the writer uses these features as a way to organize his narratives and to pay homage to one of his literary heroes, Raymond Chandler. However, these arguments have not adequately addressed the fact that many of Murakami’s novels fit into the definition of the metaphysical detective story, which is “a text that parodies or subverts traditional detective-story conventions” (Merivale & Sweeney 1999:2). Using this definition as a guiding principle, this paper addresses the issue of the metaphysical detective features apparent in Murakami’s third novel, A Wild Sheep Chase, and, more specifically, looks at his use of the non-solution and labyrinth as narrative devices. The main argument, then, is that Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase fits in with the metaphysical detective novel and uses the familiar tropes of the labyrinth and the non-solution to highlight our impossible search for meaning.

The Many Pasts of Detective Fiction

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-172
Author(s):  
Thomas Leitch
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Public History ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Detective Novels ◽  
The Many

Building on Tzvetan Todorov's observation that the detective novel ‘contains not one but two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation’, this essay argues that detective novels display a remarkably wide range of attitudes toward the several pasts they represent: the pasts of the crime, the community, the criminal, the detective, and public history. It traces a series of defining shifts in these attitudes through the evolution of five distinct subgenres of detective fiction: exploits of a Great Detective like Sherlock Holmes, Golden Age whodunits that pose as intellectual puzzles to be solved, hardboiled stories that invoke a distant past that the present both breaks with and echoes, police procedurals that unfold in an indefinitely extended present, and historical mysteries that nostalgically fetishize the past. It concludes with a brief consideration of genre readers’ own ambivalent phenomenological investment in the past, present, and future each detective story projects.

scholarly journals Ruritania by the Sea

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Brigitta Hudácskó
Keyword(s):  
Small Groups ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
The Body ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Detective Stories ◽  
Story Writer

Seaside resorts frequently served as locations of murder mysteries in Golden Age detection fiction, since these destinations could provide a diverse clientele, confined to manageably small groups essential to classic detective stories. The fictional seaside town of Wilvercombe serves as the location of Dorothy L. Sayers’s detective novel Have His Carcase (1932), in which Lord Peter Wimsey and detective-story writer Harriet Vane investigate the case of a man found dead on the beach. The location of the body turns out to be a source of confusion: while the detectives expect a traditional locked-room mystery to unfold (albeit in an open-air setting), the death cannot be resolved until the detectives realize that they are working in the wrong genre: instead of a clue-puzzle mystery, they are trapped in a Ruritanian romance, with outlandish tales of intrigue, unlikely members of the Russian aristocracy, and exaggerated and oppressive performances of heterosexual romance. (BH)

scholarly journals The Case of Mór Jókai and the Detective Story

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 133-144
Author(s):  
Péter Hajdu
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Love Story ◽  
History Of ◽  
Detective Stories ◽  
Exclusive Focus

While from the viewpoint of typology it is often stated that the genre of detective fiction originated with the work of Edgar Allan Poe, this statement can be challenged from the standpoint of literary or reception history. Several recent histories of detective fiction emphasize the importance of employing a wider generic view, yet they hardly expand their perspective beyond English literary traditions. This paper examines how the usual, theorized requirement for detective fiction concerning the work’s exclusive focus on the crime committed and its detection was not characteristic of nineteenth-century detective stories written in Central Europe. Even though the detective story pattern is recognizable in Mór Jókai’s short story, “A három királyok csillaga” [‘The Star of the Magi’], it does not dominate the entire depiction, but rather represents one strand woven into a tragic love story as well as the history of national resistance, aspects bearing equal significance in this very sophisticated work.

scholarly journals Names and Identities in the Italian Detective Story

2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Giovanna Arcamone
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Proper Names ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Teenth Century ◽  
The Real ◽  
Carlo Emilio Gadda ◽  
French And English ◽  
Detective Stories ◽  
Over Time

Detective stories were established in Italy at the end of the nine- teenth century in imitation of the 'noir' and the French and English serial novels. The Italian detective story over time has grown also with some of our better writers and it is to stories written by Carlo Emilio Gadda, Leonardo Sciascia, Carlo Fruttero/Franco Lucentini, Carlo Fruttero and Andrea Vitali that this paper is dedicated to investigating. In addition, all these authors reveal with linguistic reflections that they appreciate the inherent power of Proper Names. The de- tective novel is especially appropriate on the relation between proper names and identity. Indeed, normally at the beginning of events both in the real world and in detective fiction the personalities present in the good and bad texture of events have not yet been identified. These authors of Italian detective stories look for an ally in the nominatio to help them define the identity of their characters and the backdrop of their story.

Pudd'nhead Wilson: Mark Twain and the Limits of Detection

1987 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-70
Author(s):  
John S. Whitley
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Normal Function ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Auguste Dupin ◽  
Literary Process ◽  
History Of ◽  
Brothers Karamazov

My starting point is two related critical judgments. In a recent essay on the detective fiction of Ross Macdonald, Eric Mottram suggests that an important point in the history of such fiction is reached in Mark Twain's play The Amateur Detective (1877) and his short story “A Double-Barrelled Detective Story” (1902), parodies of the literary process of detection where “Twain demolishes the man-hunt plot and the Sherlock Holmes plot of aristocratic ratiocinative powers derived from Poe's Chevalier Auguste Dupin”. A quarter of a century before this, Leslie A. Fiedler came to the conclusion that Twain's most extensive treatment of detective work, Pudd'nhead Wilson, was “an anti-detective story, more like The Brothers Karamazov than The Innocence of Father Brown, its function to expose communal guilt.” The purpose of this essay will be to show how the process of detection was cited in Twain's writings throughout his career, usually but by no means inevitably in a parodic manner, and that Pudd'nhead Wilson needs to be understood as a serious, indeed, tragic parody of the detective story, one which turned most of Twain's models on their heads in order to demonstrate that a supposedly successful detective dénouement (what Fiedler elsewhere describes as “Pudd'nhead's book – a success story”) is deliberately allowed to work against its normal function in a detective novel.

scholarly journals "Inherent Vice": Thomas Pynchon beyond the Postmodern Fiction and Anti-Detective Novel

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-294
Author(s):  
Antonio Di Vilio
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Thomas Pynchon ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Postmodern Fiction ◽  
Crying Of Lot 49

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 Pynchon 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. 

scholarly journals How should we model property? Thinking with my critics

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 815-827 ◽  
Author(s):  
BENITO ARRUÑADA
Keyword(s):  
Property Rights ◽  
Transaction Costs ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Model Property ◽  
Private Ordering ◽  
Single Exchange ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Physical Dimensions

AbstractInspired by comments made by Allen (2017), Lueck (2017), Ménard (2017) and Smith (2017), this response clarifies and deepens the analysis in Arruñada (2017a). Its main argument is that to deal with the complexity of property we must abstract secondary elements, such as the physical dimensions of some types of assets, and focus on the interaction between transactions. This sequential-exchange framework captures the main problem of property in the current environment of impersonal markets. It also provides criteria to compare private and public ordering, as well as to organize public solutions that enable new forms of private ordering. The analysis applies the lessons in Coase (1960) to property by not only comparing realities but also maintaining his separate definition of property rights and transaction costs. However, it replaces his contractual, single-exchange, framework for one in which contracts interact, causing exchange externalities.

Boltanski, L. (2019). Mysteries and conspiracies. Translated by A. Zakharevich. St. Petersburg: Izdatelstvo Evropeyskogo universiteta. (In Russ.)

2021 ◽  
pp. 264-269
Author(s):  
P. A. Moiseev
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
The Other ◽  
Police Procedural ◽  
The One ◽  
Definition Of

The review deals with Luc Boltanski's Mysteries and Conspiracies [Enigmes et complots]. The following is noted as defects of the reviewed book: detective fiction is associated with anxieties that question the framework of modern reality. Such attribution, it is argued, results from inaccurate comparison of detective fiction to a spy novel. The reviewer identifies contradictions in the definition of detective fiction: on the one hand, it is characterised by the proverbial anxiety. On the other, the writer suggests that unravelling a mystery normalises the ‘integrity of predictable expectations.' In addition, Boltanski confuses detective fiction with police procedural novels as well as the concepts of genre and theme with regard to spy novels (as a result, he dwells on ‘the genre of the spy novel,' even though spy novels are written in a number of genres). The review particularly criticises Boltanski's assessment of A. Conan Doyle's prose.

Philosophy and History in the Study of Political Thought

2007 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Bartelson
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Widespread View

AbstractThis article analyzes how the relationship between philosophy and history has been conceived within the study of political thought, and how different ways of conceiving this relationship in turn have affected the definition of the subject matter as well as the choice of methods within this field. My main argument is that the ways in which we conceive this relationship is dependent on the assumptions we make about the ontological status of concepts and their meaning. I start by discussing the widespread view that philosophy and history ought to be viewed as distinct if not incompatible ways of studying political thought, and then go on to describe the view that philosophical and historical approaches should be conceived of as identical or inseparable. I end this article by suggesting that these approaches rather should be viewed as mutually constitutive for the benefit of a more coherent study of political thought.

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