New York: Cambridge University Press.ĭickens, Charles. In The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature, ed. Melbourne/London/Baltimore: Penguin Books.ĭen Tandt, Christophe. The Literature of the United States, Pelican Books. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials.Ĭunliffe, Marcus. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Ĭoverley, Merlin. In Modern North American Criticism and Theory, ed. Original edition, 1908.Ĭornis-Pope, Marcel. The Man Who Was Thursday, Penguin Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Ĭhesterton, Gilbert Keith. Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction. Original edition, 1757.īutler, Christopher. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. London: New Left Books.īorges, Jorge Luis. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. In The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. Original edition, 1968.īaudelaire, Charles. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Original edition, 1969.īakhtin, Mikhaïl M. Like the Grail narrative, the metacognitive mystery tale also builds upon and plays with a number of “intermediate,” transitional, and provisional degrees of meaningful resolution designed to captivate the reader and ultimately frustrate his or her work of interpretation.īachelard, Gaston. In a detective story, either we know who committed the murder or we do not, whereas the quest for meaning in the Grail story has an infinite number of intermediate degrees, and even in the end the quest’s outcome is not certain. But unlike the Grail story, what characterizes knowledge in detective fiction is that it has only two possible values, true or false. The investigation consists in returning over and over to events, verifying and correcting the smallest details, until the truth about the initial story finally comes out this is a story of learning. Some element of that first story is indeed made available from the beginning: a crime is committed almost before our eyes but we have been unable to determine its real agents or motives. We know such narratives are constituted by the problematic relation of two stories: the story of the crime, which is missing, and the story of the investigation, which is present, and whose only justification is to acquaint us with the other story. The search for knowledge also dominates another type of narrative that we might hesitate to compare to the quest for the Holy Grail: the mystery, or detective The principal narrative is a narrative of knowledge ideally, it would never end. Throughout the narrative the reader has to wonder about the meaning of the Grail.
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