Moralism and Individualism in Urban Fiction: A Deleuzian and Bakhtinian Critique of Spatial Transgressions in Contemporary Crime Novels
Keywords:
literary history, urban studies, crime fiction, space, Bakhtin, Mikhail M., Deleuze, GillesAbstract
Urban crime fiction can be seen as an inheritor of the adventure novel tradition and the “ordeal plot”. The semantic foundations of the ordeal plot are traditionally detailed as an opposition between labyrinthine and anomic settings on the one hand and a quest for moral authenticity on the other. In urban crime fiction one can clearly see how modern literature transforms this model in an attempt to cope with the “modernity syndrome” (the paradoxical co-existence of decoding and recoding mechanisms). Contemporary urban representations, and this will be the main focus of this contribution, radicalize the transformed model.References
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