“An End to the Essential Difference between Things”: Detective, Criminal, and the Aesthetic of Crime
Abstract
The detective fiction of Poe, Gaboriau, and Conan Doyle is best understood in relation
to an earlier genre, the crime story, with the figure of the detective representing
the descendant and the continuation of the criminals depicted in that genre. The common
ground on which the detective meets the criminal of the crime story is the concept
of an aesthetic of crime, and this idea also enables the detective’s identity with
the criminals of detective fiction. In establishing the identity of the pursuer and
the pursued, detective fiction discovers a deeper affinity between crime and art,
a discovery that carries interesting implications for the “incompleteness” of modernity.
Description
Winner of the 2009 Robert F. Durden Award
Type
Course paperPermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/1693Citation
Harpham, John (2010). “An End to the Essential Difference between Things”: Detective, Criminal, and the
Aesthetic of Crime. Course paper, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/1693.Collections
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