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The metaphysical detective story in Paul Auster's The New York trilogy and Thomas Pynchon's The crying of lot 49
Buršíková, Marika ; Robbins, David Lee (referee) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (advisor)
While the first two chapters of the thesis provide the necessary theoretical framework concerning the classical detective story and the metaphysical detective story, in the third chapter this framework is employed to analyze the particular themes that are present in The New York Trilogy and The Crying of Lot 49. To explain the metaphysical detective story, a step back to the classical detective story as its predecessor is required. To sum up the oppositions expressed in criticism dealing with this subject, the contrast between these two genres has been defined in terms of high art and popular art (Todorov), art and kitsch (Holquist), ontological dominant and epistemological dominant (McHale), postmodern and positivistic mode of thinking (Spanos). The metaphysical detective story takes the conventions of the classical detective story and distorts them in order to betray the reader's expectations. Since the popular genres are constituted by their corresponding sets of conventions which need to be familiar, any change in them causes the work to lose its status as part of the genre. In this case, the classical detective story has served as a point of departure for many authors who transformed it into a completely different genre which had no longer anything to do with popular literature. Classical detective...
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