| 著作名稱： | Economic Investigations in Twentieth-Century Detective Fiction: Expenditure, Labor, Value |
| 年度： | 2015 |
| 類別： |
學術專書
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| 摘要： | In his study of Golden Age and hard-boiled detective fiction from 1890 to 1950, Yan Zi-Ling argues that these two subgenres can be distinguished not only by theme and style, but by the way they structure knowledge, value, and productive labour. Using the detective as a reference point and enactor of socially based interests, Yan shows that Golden Age texts are distinguished by their conservationism (and not only by their conservatism), with the detectives’ actions serving to stabilize institutions with specific ideological aims. In contrast, the criminal investigations of the hard-boiled detective, who is poorly aligned with institutions and strong interest groups, reveal the fragility of the status quo in the face of escalating cycles of violence. Key to Yan’s discussion are theories of exchange, value, and the gift, the latter of which he suggests is more akin to detective work than is wage labour. Analyzing texts by a wide range of authors that includes Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Sayers, Raoul Whitfield, George Harmon Coxe, and Mickey Spillane, Yan demonstrates that the detective’s truth-generating function, most often characterized as a process of discovery rather than creation, is in fact crucial to the institutional and class-based interests that he or she serves. |
| 關鍵字： | detective fiction, popular culture, labor, economics, literary criticism |
| 著作名稱： | Salyer, Jeffrey W. “Lines of Sight: Perspective in Thomas Bernhard’s Korrektur.” Modern Austrian Literature (in press).
|
| 年度： | 2009 |
| 類別： |
期刊論文
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| 摘要： | |
| 關鍵字： | |
| 著作名稱： | Spatial Representation in Three Detective Fiction Subgenres |
| 年度： | 2018 |
| 類別： |
期刊論文
Concentric Literary and Culture Studies
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| 摘要： | In this study I examine a limited aspect of spatial representation in Golden Age, hard-boiled, and postmodern detective fiction. I situate these representations within a theory of architectural enclosure, Tschumi’s pyramid/labyrinth distinction, then employ concepts derived from Gestalt theory as pointing up an ideological tendency in the Golden Age floor plans and diagrams by which crime is contained and spaces are normalized. John Dickson Carr’s The Problem of the Wire Cage serves as a test case. The subsequent sections offer spatial analyses of Dashiell Hammett’s “The Whosis Kid” and “Dead Yellow Women” and Paul Auster’s City of Glass. Hammett’s stories illustrate the breakdown of visual mastery in disorienting spaces whose textual representation parallels the Op’s own limited knowledge. Auster’s diagrams appear to offer a synthesis of prior positions: he incorporates plans which seem to promise meaning but which ultimately fail to establish certainty. I argue, however, that Auster’s plans are most effectively read in their specific socio-historical and political context and that the performative loss of referential certainty in his protagonist reflects a form of critique that differs from earlier genres’ use of these figures.
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| 關鍵字： | detective fiction, space, floor plans, Gestalt theory, representation |
| 著作名稱： | Lines of Sight: Perspective in Thomas Bernhard’s Korrektur |
| 年度： | 2010 |
| 類別： |
期刊論文
Modern Austrian Literature
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| 摘要： | The historical understanding of cones and conic sections, functioning as metaphors and perspectival de-centerings, provides a basis to engage Bernhard’s Wohnkegel in Korrektur. Discursive mastery, in Roithamer’s meditative fragments and the narrator’s recapitulation of his engagement with those fragments, is related to this conic problem as a tendency to self-erasure through infinite displacement. |
| 關鍵字： | Thomas Bernhard, Korrektur, space, architecture, perspective |
| 著作名稱： | Mastery and Mock Dialectic in Thomas Bernhard’s Correction |
| 年度： | 2010 |
| 類別： |
期刊論文
Concentric Literary and Culture Studies
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| 摘要： | A central conflict in Thomas Bernhards novel Correction concerns the relation between the narrator and his deceased friend, Roithamer, for whom the narrator serves as literary executor. Although Roithamer is dead, the two men nonetheless appear to enter a conflictive struggle involving domination and mastery since the narrator understands Roithamer’s bequest as an aggressive gesture intended to destroy him. Though the general form of the contest resembles the Hegelian master-slave dialectic, the dialectic is subjected to two types of critique. The first critical point concerns the theatricalization or staging of conflict in Höller’s garret, the spatial focus of the novel; the second is connected to identity and the recuperation of meaning vis-à-vis correction in the special sense of the novel’s title. Although the notion of dialectic as a process initiated by non-identity is already present in the special meaning of correction, by which concepts are ruthlessly subjected to negations of negations, correction also refers to suicide—Roithamer “corrects” himself out of existence. In this sense of correction, the struggle does indeed respond to internal contradiction but cannot be recuperated in sublation; the result is more akin to abstract negation, annihilation, and therefore an attack on the very conditions which make meaning possible. The question remains whether the narrator is compelled to function slavishly by extending recognition to Roithamer through his labor, or whether he can evade both the “restricted economy” of Hegelian negation without succumbing to Roithamer’s extreme act of self-destruction. Several critics (Adorno, Deleuze, and Derrida) point the way through these two applications of Hegel—first, in helping to show how what is in fact happening, in the potential discursive reduction of Roithamer through the labor of the narrator, is either mock-dialectic or formal liquidation and second, in pointing up the significance of the narrator’s laughter. |
| 關鍵字： | Thomas Bernhard, Correction, negation, master-slave dialectic, abstract negativity, theatricality |
| 著作名稱： | Paratextual Framing Devices in Frederick Davis’s Operator #5 Novellas |
| 年度： | 2021 |
| 類別： |
期刊論文
Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture
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| 摘要： | Examines the use of paratextual devices, specifically footnotes and headlines, in Frederick Daviss Operator #5 series |
| 關鍵字： | pulp fiction, popular culture, paratexts |
| 著作名稱： | Women, Economics, and Sherlock Holmes’s Gift-Labor |
| 年度： | 2018 |
| 類別： |
期刊論文
Intergrams
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| 摘要： | Detective fiction of all types is distinguished by its close attention to work, work which is frequently construed as gift. The gift character of detective labor, which first registers as unremunerated labor, ultimately incurs unpayable debts with ostensibly valuable social functions. But far from genuinely registering as aneconomic, the detective’s gift-labor frequently entails investment in specific social interests, which, depending upon the subgenre, tends towards the affirmation or negation of dominant modes of social control. Classical detective fiction, exemplified in this essay by early Sherlock Holmes narratives, functions as such an invested gift, one which reinforces an economic frame producing calculated returns involving the reification and circulation of women. The theoretical framework underpinning this analysis begins from Lévi-Strauss’s connection between incest prohibition and the gift; this premise is in turn conjoined to a capitalist worldview through Bataille’s analysis of marriage and eroticism. After examining the themes of labor and marriage in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, I offer an analysis of three celebrated texts from this collection: “A Case of Identity,” “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” and “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches.” From these stories, I determine that Holmes consistently buttresses notions of economic exchange whereby women are regarded as forms of capital whose circulation must contend with the blocks posed by recalcitrant father figures. Holmes’s intervention forces this “gift” of women, thereby contesting the obstacles represented by these hoarding fathers. |
| 關鍵字： | detective fiction, labor, gift, economics, marriage, Arthur Conan Doyle |
| 著作名稱： | “‘The Millstone of His Own Likeness’: Photography as Disclosure, Concealment, and Correspondence in Detective Fiction.” |
| 年度： | 2016 |
| 類別： |
期刊論文
Sun Yat-Sen Journal of Humanities
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| 摘要： | The rise, expansion, and popularization of photography (and the uses to which it
was put by law enforcement agencies) parallel the expanded presence of photography
in detective fiction. During the late nineteenth century, the emerging disciplines of
criminology, psychology, and sociology discovered the inestimable value of the fixed
and measurable image, subject to reproduction, distribution, and minute study, to their
respective fields. By 1935 Henry Morton Robinson declares confidently that after the
criminal’s image is photographically captured and archived, his apprehension is all
but guaranteed: “from that moment forward the millstone of his own likeness is
inexorably fastened around his neck; wherever he goes it betrays his infamous
identity, and, if he is a fugitive, makes certain his ultimate detection and capture.” The
reference to “identity” and “detection” presumes that individuality cannot long remain
secret or hidden away when subjected to the impersonal gaze of the photographic
apparatus. The disclosure of this identity is mediated by a supposed correspondence
between photograph and world, undistorted by ideological forces. This view, though
assumed by early authors like R. Austin Freeman and Arthur B. Reeve, is undercut by
American detective fiction authors from the late 1930s onwards—cautiously in
George Harmon Coxe, but with increasing anxiety in Raymond Chandler, Ross
Macdonald, and Paul Auster. An examination of the uses of photography in these
authors’ detective stories demonstrates the collapse of correspondence between the
image and its supposed referent, and the impenetrability of identity. The photographic
image, initially hailed for its capacity to reveal, subsequently works to conceal and to
render ambiguous. |
| 關鍵字： | photography, detective fiction, identity |
| 著作名稱： | Salyer, Jeff W. “Serra’s Indiscipline: Neutralization and the Site of Tilted Arc.” Concentric 35.1 (2009): 229-260.
|
| 年度： | 2009 |
| 類別： |
期刊論文
|
| 摘要： | |
| 關鍵字： | |
| 著作名稱： | Salyer, Jeffrey W. “From Materialist Feminism to Chodorow’s Mothering: Economy, Energy, and Expenditure.” NTU Studies in Language and Literature 19 (2008): 1-33.
|
| 年度： | 2008 |
| 類別： |
期刊論文
|
| 摘要： | |
| 關鍵字： | |
| 著作名稱： | Salyer, Jeffrey W. “A Critique of Fried’s Understanding of Theatricality in ‘Art and Objecthood.’” Drama and Fiction 18.2 (2008): 53-77.
|
| 年度： | 2008 |
| 類別： |
期刊論文
|
| 摘要： | |
| 關鍵字： | |
| 著作名稱： | Salyer, Jeffrey W. “‘Ihr Untergang muß neu erfunden werden’: Uses of Allegory in Botho Strauß’s Schlußchor.” Soochow Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures 25 (2007): 1-29.
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| 年度： | 2007 |
| 類別： |
期刊論文
|
| 摘要： | |
| 關鍵字： | |
| 著作名稱： | Salyer, Jeffrey W. “Deleuze, Difference, and Multiculturalism.” Journal of Foreign Language Instruction 1 (2006): 83-100.
|
| 年度： | 2006 |
| 類別： |
期刊論文
|
| 摘要： | |
| 關鍵字： | |
| 著作名稱： | Salyer, Jeffrey W. “Bourget Framed: Re-reading Hofmannsthal’s Der Tor und der Tod.” Tamkang
Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 27 (2006): 43-58.
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| 年度： | 2006 |
| 類別： |
期刊論文
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| 摘要： | |
| 關鍵字： | |
| 著作名稱： | Criminal Sleight of Hand: The Detective Magician as Transitional Figure |
| 年度： | 2020 |
| 類別： |
期刊論文
The Wenshan Review
|
| 摘要： | The detective magician, an American subgenre, was
popularized by several series characters between 1935 and 1945.
This decade comprises a meeting point between different strains of
detective fiction: the waning years of the Golden Age, a highpoint
of hard-boiled pulp detectives, and the rise of the espionage novel.
Following Ernest Mandel’s general chronology from Delightful
Murder, I argue that the detective magician serves as a transitional
figure who embodies contradictory impulses: the conflation of
mystification and demystification, the supernatural and the rational,
and justice and criminality. After a preliminary discussion of
magic’s self-dividedness, I review the overlap between magic,
theology, and science in the context of the nineteenth century,
moving from there to the interrelation of these threads with
detective fiction. Important theoretical writers include Simon
During and Michael Saler. I then explain why stage magic is an
appropriate vehicle to represent these contradictions through
discussions of exemplary detective stories by G. T. FlemingRoberts, Walter Gibson, Clayton Rawson, and Sax Rohmer |
| 關鍵字： | magic and magicians in literature, detective fiction, pulps, criminality, ideology |