Kriminalistische Dekonstruktion. Zur Poetik der postmodernen Kriminalromane [Criminalistic Deconstruction. On the Poetics of Postmodern Crime Novels]
The classic detectives have always been successful in their search for the truth. The ambiguous clues they had to decipher were the narrative building blocks of a clear solution. Borges, Gadda, Robbe-Grillet, Pynchon, Perec, Auster and others introduce failed detectives in their stories, thus suspending the causal logic and order of narratives at whose conclusion the truth stands.In the process, branching paths of entropy, carnival, paranoia, puzzle, deconstruction, silence emerge. These anti-crime novels use the elements inherent to the genre, such as self-reference and intertextuality, to further emphasise the open-ended nature of detection. The crime novel genre has always been understood as an allegory of the act of reading; thus modified, it becomes a paradigm of postmodernity and the postmodern insecurity of the reader. The very precise textual analyses lead to a complex poetics of the crime novel genre, which includes the anti-crime novels. The author Alida Bremer studied comparative literature, Romance studies, German studies and Slavic studies in Belgrade, Rome, Münster and Saarbrücken. She lives in Münster and works as a freelance author and translator. (From the announcement of the publisher)