My thesis, by offering an analysis of their individual stylistic approaches, considers how Ellroy, Higgins and Leonard expand the parameters of the crime fiction genre. The genre is still essentially conservative, a mediating detective/police hero synthesising narrative strands to indicate cause and effect, problem and resolution, thereby affirming the notion of a dominant grand narrative in society, of the status quo. I examine how Ellroy, Higgins and Leonard offer a critical perspective that subverts the artificial constraints of this concept by privileging the dialogic interaction of the multiple narratives of contemporary pluralistic society over the notion of a containable, transgressive, crime. Conventionally, in crime fiction, transgression is resolved with some restoration of the 'normal'. I review how Ellroy, Higgins and Leonard interrogate notions of normality by foregrounding ambiguity and the dialogic relationship between the multiple social narratives of normless, postmodem, society, rather than offering attempts to contain them within a single, dominant, 'normal', social narrative. I investigate how their respective 'languages' offer differing juxtapositions of words and images that freely exploit the linguistic richness of dialogue, of the language of the 'street', of the intertextual imagery of popular culture and of media dominated contemporary awareness. I view how, by using multiple intertextualities, they offer modes of narrative discourse that reflect a media dominated age and engage with a society where the simple binary divisions of good and bad, cause and effect, are increasingly inappropriate. Each explores a society where fiction, the media projection of reality, is often a more powerful source of identity than reality, itself often a result of fictionalised projections by those with vested interests in preserving a dominant social narrative. I examine how each avoids the conventional heroic figure in favour of ordinary people trying to survive within the dynamic of interacting social narratives.

As one of the first scholarly studies of Ulf Miehe’s Ich hab noch einen Toten in Berlin, this thesis undertakes a close reading of the novel, thereby providing a basis for further research. According to Linda Hutcheon's typology of metafiction as outlined in her book titled Narcisstic Narrative Miehe's novel displays the characteristics that fall under her category of overt metafiction, as opposed to covert metafiction. Overt metafiction self-consciously thematizes narrative, stating outright that a parallel theme to the narrative is the discussion of the narrative. Following mainly Hutcheon's defining characteristics of overt metafiction, I have separated my narrative analysis of Miehe's novel into three sections: pastiche, intertextuality, and narrative layering. The first two sections are concerned namely with how the novel engages with the discourses of the hard-boiled genre and the theoretical and social considerations of the artist, while the last section explores how the form and content expresses this self-conscious disruption of the narrative. The argument unfolds by first discussing Fredric Jameson's concept of pastiche in place of Linda Hutcheon's parody, as indicative of a shift from modernism to post-modernism. Benjamin's narrative (the main character) as a performance projects his pastiche of the hard-boiled genre onto Berlin, recording the gap between the world he experiences and the image he projects onto the world, indicating that it is to be read as imitation. Benjamin documents the inauthenticity of the hard-boiled genre's realism through his projection and indicates the possibility of many versions through Anna's countering version. In the second section, intertextuality is discussed through Hutcheon's link to T. S. Eliot's concept of tradition in literature. Miehe's intertextual references engage with the artistic, theoretical and social considerations of the tradition, including realism of the hard-boiled genre, influence anxiety, originality, inspiration, and race relations. When Miehe includes references to the hard-boiled genre in literature and film, and to himself, his novel questions the necessity and accuracy of the hard-boiled genre's claim to realism, but also expresses part of that questioning to be a comparison and search for inspiration for original work. This involves the recognition of the past texts as not the one and only authentic version or form, but that innovation requires a recreating of past texts. The last and third section concerns narrative layering as a means to thematize narrative within a narrative. Through the devices of mise en abyme, storytelling, narrative thematizing, and narrative framing, the text shows itself to be self-aware of its function as narrative, while creating that narrative. These devices attempt to engage the reader as an active participant as the text questions its own conceptualization of reality, the diegetic world, hopefully leading the reader to question the perception of reality presented in all texts. The occurrences of metafictional devices in Miehe's novel develop the text as what Patricia Waugh describes as the site of communication between the reader and the writer. The writer has dismantled the codes that would usually cause a passive reader. Instead, the reader is encouraged to recreate the narrative through disruptive clues. In this active role, detecting the authentic text becomes the investigation of the many texts.

As one of the first scholarly studies of Ulf Miehe’s Ich hab noch einen Toten in Berlin, this thesis undertakes a close reading of the novel, thereby providing a basis for further research. According to Linda Hutcheon's typology of metafiction as outlined in her book titled Narcisstic Narrative Miehe's novel displays the characteristics that fall under her category of overt metafiction, as opposed to covert metafiction. Overt metafiction self-consciously thematizes narrative, stating outright that a parallel theme to the narrative is the discussion of the narrative. Following mainly Hutcheon's defining characteristics of overt metafiction, I have separated my narrative analysis of Miehe's novel into three sections: pastiche, intertextuality, and narrative layering. The first two sections are concerned namely with how the novel engages with the discourses of the hard-boiled genre and the theoretical and social considerations of the artist, while the last section explores how the form and content expresses this self-conscious disruption of the narrative. The argument unfolds by first discussing Fredric Jameson's concept of pastiche in place of Linda Hutcheon's parody, as indicative of a shift from modernism to post-modernism. Benjamin's narrative (the main character) as a performance projects his pastiche of the hard-boiled genre onto Berlin, recording the gap between the world he experiences and the image he projects onto the world, indicating that it is to be read as imitation. Benjamin documents the inauthenticity of the hard-boiled genre's realism through his projection and indicates the possibility of many versions through Anna's countering version. In the second section, intertextuality is discussed through Hutcheon's link to T. S. Eliot's concept of tradition in literature. Miehe's intertextual references engage with the artistic, theoretical and social considerations of the tradition, including realism of the hard-boiled genre, influence anxiety, originality, inspiration, and race relations. When Miehe includes references to the hard-boiled genre in literature and film, and to himself, his novel questions the necessity and accuracy of the hard-boiled genre's claim to realism, but also expresses part of that questioning to be a comparison and search for inspiration for original work. This involves the recognition of the past texts as not the one and only authentic version or form, but that innovation requires a recreating of past texts. The last and third section concerns narrative layering as a means to thematize narrative within a narrative. Through the devices of mise en abyme, storytelling, narrative thematizing, and narrative framing, the text shows itself to be self-aware of its function as narrative, while creating that narrative. These devices attempt to engage the reader as an active participant as the text questions its own conceptualization of reality, the diegetic world, hopefully leading the reader to question the perception of reality presented in all texts. The occurrences of metafictional devices in Miehe's novel develop the text as what Patricia Waugh describes as the site of communication between the reader and the writer. The writer has dismantled the codes that would usually cause a passive reader. Instead, the reader is encouraged to recreate the narrative through disruptive clues. In this active role, detecting the authentic text becomes the investigation of the many texts.

There has been much debate over the nature of relations between the different ethnic and racial groups in the United States. Some argue that the United States is a genuinely multi-cultural nation where the opportunity for universal socio-political and economic advancement still exists. Others, however, paint America as a nation fundamentally split down a black'/'white' middle, despite the recent arrival of vast numbers of immigrants from Asia and Latin America and maintain that racially-determined discrimination has irrevocably undermined its pluralist ambitions. It is my belief that neither position offers an entirely accurate portrait of the nature of relations between different ethnic and racial groups, because neither offers a suitably complex and flexible model for boundary or identity construction. Using Bakhtin's theory of 'dialogics' I argue that detective fiction can provide this kind of model because the novel is "heteroglot" and as such reflects all the voices present in society, and the detective acts as a kind of cultural mediator who moves between and thus draws together the different racial and ethnic groups. I also explore the formal and thematic characteristics of detective fiction produced by writers of African-American, Chicano, Cuban and Jewish descent in order to establish how their experiences have been different. Yet, it is not my aim to seal off the various groups in pure ethnic enclaves; rather, to assess whether and where the areas of commonality exist. To this extent, I theorize 'race' and 'ethnicity' as overlapping yet diverging categories. I argue that the ethnic detective novel acknowledges this situation and offers a model for identity construction which both recognizes the extent of racial divisions but which is also flexible enough to acknowledge that significant group interplay does also take place.

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This study analyzes crime novels written around the turn of the twenty-first century that blur the boundaries between “serious” fiction and genre fiction. I argue that these novels represent violence, not as an isolated event or action, but as a pervasive cultural logic. In other words, they frame violence as a cultural and institutional problem, instead of as a disruptive social anomaly, and they thereby expose violence as a constitutive force in a world and era in which social relations are always already mediated by the disciplinary apparatus of institutions. Novels like Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Nuruddin Farah’s Secrets, and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, draw attention to the cultural logic of violence by reproducing conventions associated with more traditional crime fiction—a crime to be solved, a “detective” figure, and the gradual revelation of clues—but these novels break with traditional crime fiction in one important way: they do not follow a trajectory of crime and punishment. Such a trajectory necessarily limits our understanding of violence to isolated actions that can be punished and to individuals who can be reformed. By breaking with the logic of crime and punishment, these novels position violence as a master narrative or as an interpretive lens that invites readers to engage in a critique of institutionalized and systemic violence. This investigation traces how this new practice of crime narrative seeks to exile readers from horizons of expectations that would ordinarily be associated with crime fiction. These contemporary novels constitute a new crime fiction subgenre: a narrative that, through the use of new conventions, forces its readers to confront the limits of canonical forms and to consider violence as a contemporary master narrative. / text

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Includes bibliographical references (leaves 166-168). CD-ROMs comprise: Appendix A. Family values: fictocritical sentences -- appendix C. Reforming the boy: fictocritical sentences Primarily enacts a fictocritical mapping of local cultural events essentially concerned with crime and trauma in Adelaide. The fictocritical treatment of these events simulates their unresolved or traumatised condition. A secondary concern is the relationship between electronic writing (hypertext) and fictocriticism.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 166-168). / 168 leaves : ill. ; 30 cm. + 2 sound discs (CD) / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Primarily enacts a fictocritical mapping of local cultural events essentially concerned with crime and trauma in Adelaide. The fictocritical treatment of these events simulates their unresolved or traumatised condition. A secondary concern is the relationship between electronic writing (hypertext) and fictocriticism. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of English, 2001