Call for Papers - Detecting the Margins: New Perspectives on the Critical History of Detective Fiction

Detecting the Margins: New Perspectives on the Critical History of Detective Fiction

Since its emergence from the periodical press into the first mass-market novelistic craze, detective fiction has occupied a liminal position in the margins of aesthetic legitimacy—and critical study. Detection is a popular genre, a “literature of escape,” that nevertheless seems to make a claim to, and find purchase in, more rarefied aesthetic and intellectual precincts. Michael Holquist styles detection as a guilty pleasure of the reading classes: “The same people who spent their days with James Joyce were reading Agatha Christie at night.” This panel asks what that liminal position might show us about both the genre and the conditions—theoretical, professional, material—of its study. 

Because of this tenuous position, academic critics of detection often experience themselves as operating in a critical vacuum, obliged to defend their object of study—as a result, there are more beginnings than middles in the scholarship of the genre, and its two most frequent themes are 1) the generic origins and parameters of the detective genre, and 2) whether or not it counts as literature. But the critical history of detective fiction is far from sparse: beyond the (persistent) debate over its literary status, the genre has galvanized generalists (Barzun, Haycraft, Symons); attracted the attention of scholars working from materialist, historical, and cultural-studies approaches; supported major critical work (D.A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police, Mark McGurl’s The Novel Art); and fascinated theorists (Lacan, Hartman, Jameson, Boltanski, Moretti). It has also amassed a body of scholarly and parascholarly work from outside the campus gates, foregrounding institutional, methodological, and professional margins as both an obstacle to and an object of study. And as detection proliferates into new media, styles, hybrid forms, and diasporic territory, it shows no sign of going away. 

To move beyond the received sense of critical absence that hamstrings its study, then, the genre’s scholars must play detective: gather the clues, match story against story, synthesize a narrative that matches and contextualizes the facts. This panel solicits new understandings of the critical history of detective fiction. What are its consensuses and its controversies, its conceptions and misconceptions, its crucial terms, lacunae, and stakes? What can reconstructing its critical history make visible about the genre? What can that reconstruction, and the fact of its necessity, make visible about criticism, its institutional contexts, its methods and practices, and its margins? 

Sites of interest include but are not limited to:

Detection and empiricism

The pedagogy of popular culture

Detection, mass culture, and the Frankfurt School

Detection and the canon wars

Detection and deconstruction

Detection and modes of readership: close reading, symptomatic reading, distant reading, "just reading"

Genre and economies of academic prestige

Networks and methods of critique: lay criticism, fan criticism, professional criticism, and academic criticism

Detection and neoliberalism

Detection and the humanities crisis

Please submit abstracts through NeMLA's submission portal here by September 30: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/18221