Mollie Eisenberg (University of Southern California)

Detective fiction is modernism's signature popular genre; it arises nearly chronologically coextensively with high modernism (and with professional literary study). Yet detection often plays the role of modernist antithesis—a role given to it by the critics staking out a claim for literary study as a profession and as a gatekeeping institution and often perpetuated by scholarly consensus since. Despite critical and creative engagement from major modernists like Stein, Eliot, and Pound, criticism from the modernist moment to the contemporary one understand the genre as fundamentally opposed to the modernist aesthetic project: backward-looking as opposed to forward-looking, nostalgic instead of visionary, and reparative rather than deconstructive. Edmund Wilson's famous genre takedown, "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" is a kind of mirror image of Axel's Castle, his elevation of the canonical modernists. Dennis Porter articulates in The Pursuit of Crime: The Art and Ideology of Detective Fiction the post-New Critical consensus, which still very much holds sway: detective fiction “functions as a literature of reassurance and conformism”; its “fundamental conservatism” is expressed in its form in addition to its ideology: it is, according to Porter and a great many critics who succeed him, both formally and ideologically “a genre committed to an act of recovery, moving forward to move back.” (It is also, Wilson adds, "sub-literary" in its style.) Yet it remains inescapably true that detection shares formal, historical, and coterie characteristics with its canonical counterpart, and equally true that detection has in many senses outlived it—and that a recent boom in detective scholarship is reorienting detection's role in the literary landscape.

This panel seeks to convene a conversation that theorizes the relationship between the detective novel, the modernist art novel, and literary study—and in doing so move the critical study of detective fiction beyond the impulse to validate the genre as an object of study or redeem it from the stigma of genre. Papers might, for example, consider the aesthetic legacy of modernism, the theoretical architecture of professional literary study and the current state and/or implications of the study of detective fiction, the terms of canonicity, the epistemics of the detective form, or questions of readership, markets, or the history of the book and/or the university.

This panel seeks to convene a conversation that theorizes the relationship between the detective novel, the modernist art novel, and literary study—and in doing so move the critical study of detective fiction beyond the impulse to validate the genre as an object of study or redeem it from the stigma of genre. Papers might, for example, consider the aesthetic legacy of modernism, the theoretical architecture of professional literary study and the current state and/or implications of the study of detective fiction, the terms of canonicity, the epistemics of the detective form, or questions of readership, markets, or the history of the book and/or the university.