Literatura policial y policía: reflexiones a partir de dos intervenciones críticas (José Pablo Feinmann y Carlos Gamerro)

I propose a close reading on two critical interventions about crime fiction in Argentina: “Estado policial y novela negra argentina” (1991) by José Pablo Feinmann and “Para una reformulación del género policial argentino” (2006) by Carlos Gamerro. Beyond the time difference between the two, I observe aspects in common. Both texts elaborate a corpus of writers and fictions; propose an interpretative guide between the literary and the political-social series; maintain a specific interest in the relationship between crime fiction and police; and elaborate figures of enunciators who serve both as theorists of the genre and as writers of fiction. Among these four dimensions, the one that particularly interests me here is the third, since it allows me to investigate the link that is assumed between “detective fiction” and “police institution”. My conclusion is twofold: on the one hand, in both essays predominates a reductionist vision of the genre, since a kind of necessity is emphasized in the representation of the social order; on the other, its main objective seems to lie in intervening directly on the definitions of the detective fiction in Argentina (and, on this point, both texts acquire an undoubtedly prescriptive nuance).

Narkopowieść latynoamerykańska: rzeczywistość z Szekspirem w tle

Latin American literature is not rich in references to the works of Shakespeare, but rather focuses on its own tradition. The premise on which this article is based, however, is that the reality of the region displays Shakespearean characteristics. The aim of this article is to present a subgenre, or a literary convention, known as a narconovel. The configuration of the represented world in this noir novel variant is determined by the drug trade with its far-reaching social and cultural implications. The narconovel is an important part of the most recent literature in Colombia, Mexico, and other countries of the region. This article addresses associations and disassociations between the narconovel and the crime fiction convention, centering on Shakespearean motifs, related in this case to the concepts of power, crime, guilt, and punishment.

Szekspirowskie przywołania w polskiej literaturze kryminalnej (rekonesans)

Taking into consideration the variety of Shakespearean elements both in world and Polish literature, it is hard to resist the impression that it is the phenomenon without which European culture would be impossible to imagine. At the same time, the writer — whose works not only constitute an important part of Western culture and determine its canon, but also have an influence on current, globalised culture — is perceived as a “dangerous trap”. The above-mentioned danger seems to derive, paradoxically, from the ubiquity of Shakespeare’s works, which are used as a point of reference for modern stories and sometimes treated instrumentally as the “culture brand”. However, it is important to determine if the reception of Shakespeare — present in the socio-cultural aesthetics as well as in the area of paratheatrical avant-garde — among Polish audience is followed by the pop-cultural assimilation of his works. The success on the market of crime fiction whose authors relate to Shakespeare’s works implies the reductio ad absurdum question: how much of Shakespeare remains in these Shakespearean inspirations? Are they really inspirations or is Shakespeare only the brand-author who, due to his name, elevates a given text on the cultural level? If that was the case, we would be experiencing the branding after the pattern of culturally imposed stereotypes. They are in turn assimilated by the popular culture and have a significant impact on the everyday behaviours of the readers — including their attitude towards the past. Thus, tracking the Shakespearean traces within this cultural circuit usually remains a “wishful thinking”, while countless Polish stories (or the ones that the readers know from translations into the Polish language) about “crime and punishment” are the exceptions that prove the rule.

ARIAS-BADIA, Blanca. Subtitling Television Series. A Corpus-Driven Study of Police Procedurals. Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, New York, Wien, Peter Lang, 2020, 248 pp., ISBN 978-1-78707-796-6 (print), ISBN 978-1-78707-798-0 (ePub)

The Audiovisual Translation (AVT) and Media Accessibility fields have found an ongoing interest in corpus research both for descriptive purposes (Matamala, 2008; Baños, 2013; Reviers, 2017) and for teaching purposes (Rica Peromingo, 2019; Baños, 2021). In an interdisciplinary fashion, Blanca Arias-Badia’s book Subtitling Television Series. A Corpus-Driven Study of Police Procedurals specifically takes on the task of describing the principal linguistic features of crime fiction television scripts and their corresponding Spanish subtitles. Its interdisciplinary nature lies on the combination of Television Studies, Linguistics and Translation Studies (TS). Notably, the author explores the notion of norms and patterns through the lens of these three disciplines, all by situating the source text and the target text in the spoken word to written language continuum. The book follows a clear structure of nine chapters including a theoretical and methodological contextualisation of the (quantitative and qualitative) morphosyntactic and lexical analysis of the Corpus of Police Procedurals [...]

Detective Stories During Apartheid: H.I.E. Dhlomo as a Precursor of Drum

This article aims to contribute to the discussion of English-language crime fiction by black South African writers before 1994 by exploring H.I.E. Dhlomo’s relatively overlooked contribution to the genre in the first decade of apartheid. In particular, I intend to close read three detective stories written between the late 1940s and the early 1950s by Dhlomo, namely “Village Blacksmith Tragicomedy”, “Flowers”, and “Aversion to Snakes”, and compare them with the more celebrated stories published by Arthur Maimane in the popular magazine Drum a few years later. Notwithstanding their different re-elaboration of the tropes of crime fiction, I argue that both Dhlomo and Maimane resorted to this productive strand of popular literature to reassert a claim to knowledge denied to Africans, saturating their texts with new local meanings and exceeding Western genre conventions.

Detecting the Diagnosis: Parasitology, Crime Fiction, and the British Medical Gaze

In this chapter, Taylor-Pirie traces the cultural encounters between the parasitologist and the scientific detective in the medico-popular imagination, revealing how such meetings helped to embed the figure of the doctor-detective in public understandings of science. Parasitologists like Ronald Ross and David Bruce were routinely reported in newspapers using detective fiction’s most famous archetype: Sherlock Holmes, a frame of reference that blurred the boundaries between romance and reality. Recognising the continued cultural currency of Holmesian detection in clinical and diagnostic medicine, she re-immerses the ‘great detective’ and his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, in the literary-historical contexts of the fin de siècle, demonstrating how material and rhetorical entanglements between criminality, tropical medicine, and empire constructed the microscopic world as new kind of colonial encounter.