The Ratiocination Effect in Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy
1
조회
0
다운로드
0
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
Despite its enormous popularity and recognition as one of the representative American literary works of the turn of the last century, Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy has been largely seen as a product of the Postmodern temper. The three novellas that comprise the Trilogy deal with the familiar themes and plot schemes of popular detective novels, yet early reviewers have been exasperated by the ambiguities surrounding the narrative center, the deliberate employment of multiple narrative schemes, satisfactory sense of closure, and mix match of intertexual undercurrents. Consequently, scholars in the past have assumed that a 'subversive' agenda was latent in the Trilogy, a backhanded counter-discourse of the detective story genre, which one critic refers to as "anti-detective fiction." This paper, however, seeks to show that the elements of the works in the Trilogy can be analyzed well within the traditional, and well established, detective story discourse. Through close reading of the text, the paper attempts to illustrate that the author deliberately engages his readers in what is known within the mystery and detective story genre as "the ratiocination effect," namely the inclination for analytic deduction based on clear and/or inconspicuous clues provided within the story. The paper focuses on the quandaries surrounding the issue of authorship of the three sections of the Trilogy, arguing that it is here that Auster most solicits the ratiocinative participation of his readers.
Abstract
Despite its enormous popularity and recognition as one of the representative American literary works of the turn of the last century, Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy has been largely seen as a product of the Postmodern temper. The three novellas that comprise the Trilogy deal with the familiar themes and plot schemes of popular detective novels, yet early reviewers have been exasperated by the ambiguities surrounding the narrative center, the deliberate employment of multiple narrative schemes, satisfactory sense of closure, and mix match of intertexual undercurrents. Consequently, scholars in the past have assumed that a 'subversive' agenda was latent in the Trilogy, a backhanded counter-discourse of the detective story genre, which one critic refers to as "anti-detective fiction." This paper, however, seeks to show that the elements of the works in the Trilogy can be analyzed well within the traditional, and well established, detective story discourse. Through close reading of the text, the paper attempts to illustrate that the author deliberately engages his readers in what is known within the mystery and detective story genre as "the ratiocination effect," namely the inclination for analytic deduction based on clear and/or inconspicuous clues provided within the story. The paper focuses on the quandaries surrounding the issue of authorship of the three sections of the Trilogy, arguing that it is here that Auster most solicits the ratiocinative participation of his readers.
참고문헌 (20)
- Alford, Steven E., "Mirrors of Madness: Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy", Critique, 37(1), pp.17~33 (1995)
- Auster, Paul, "The Art of Hunger and Other Essays" (1982), Menard Press
- Auster, Pau, "The New York Trilogy" (1990), Penguin Books
- Bakerman, Jane, "Guises and Disguises of the Eccentric Amateur Detective. in : Comic Crime" (1987), Bowling Green State UP
- Brooks, Cleanth, "A Chronology of 'A Rose for Emily'. in : William Faulkner: Towards Yoknapatawpha and Beyond", pp.382~384 (1978), Yale UP
- "Spellbound" (2008)[URL]
- Dove, George N., "The Reader and the Detective Story" (1997), Bowling Green State UP
- Hau, Andreas, "The Implosion of Negativity: the Poetry and Early Prose of Paul Auster" (2010), Books on Demand Ghmh
- Haycraft, Howard, "Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story" (1984), Carroll & Graf
- Heinze, Rüdiger, "Ethics of Literary Forms in Contemporary American Literature" (2005), LIT
- Herzogenrath, Bernd, "An Art of Desire: Reading Paul Auster. Postmodern Studies 21" (1999), Rodopi B.V.
- Lewis, Barry, "The Strange Case of Paul Auster", Review of Contemporary Fiction, 4(1), pp.53~61 (1994)
- Martin, Brendan, "Paul Auster's Postmodernity" (2008), Taylor & Francis
- Nealon, Jennifer, "Work of the Detective, Work of the Writer: Auster's City of Glass. in : Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism", pp.117~133 (1999), U of Pennsylvania P
- Poe, Edgar Allan, "The Philosophy of Composition. in : Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe", pp.452~463 (1956), Houghton Mifflin, Co.
- Russell, Alison, "Decontructing The New York Trilogy: Paul Auster's Anti-Detective Fiction", Critique, pp.71~84 (1990)
- Shoell-Glass, Charlotte, "Fictions of the Art World: Art, Art History and the Art Historian in Literary Space. in : Writing and Seeing: Essays on Word and Image", pp.107~118 (2006), Editions Rodopi B.V.
- Tani, Stefano, "The Doomed Detective" (1984), Southern Illinois UP
- Varvogli, Aliki, "The World That is the Book: Paul Auster's Fiction" (2001), Liverpool UP
- Zilcosky, John, "The Revenge of the Author: Paul Auster's Challenge to Theory", Critique, 39(3), pp.195~206 (1998)