This module is not currently running in 2024 to 2025.
This module examines a selection of French novels from the post-war period to the present day. Each of these novels employs the tropes of detective fiction as part of a wider literary project. The module invites students to analyse the ways in which the hermeneutic imperative of detective fiction is deployed within literary (and often experimental) fiction from this period. The corpus will include nouveaux romans, works by the Oulipo writer Georges Perec, the postmodern detective fictions of Pennac and Echenoz, and Amélie Nothomb’s autofiction. Students will be encouraged to explore questions of genre fiction, the productive interplay between genre fiction and literary fiction during this period, and the ways in which the tropes of detective fiction are used during the postmodern period to explore questions of knowledge, truth and identity.
Total contact hours: 20
Essay (5000 words) - 100%
Any edition:
Jean Echenoz, Cherokee [1983];
Sébastien Japrisot, Un été meurtrier / One Deadly Summer [1977];
Amélie Nothomb, Hygiène de l'assassin / Hygiene and the Assassin [1992];
Daniel Pennac, Au bonheur des ogres / The Scapegoat [1985];
Georges Perec, La Disparition / A Void [1969];
Alain Robbe-Grillet, Les Gommes / The Erasers [1953]
See the library reading list for this module (Canterbury)
Students will be able to engage critically with a variety of approaches to and uses of the tropes of detective fiction in French literary fiction from the post-war period to the present day;
Students will be able to explore the ways in which aspects of crime fiction are deployed within French literary texts of the post-war period;
Students will be able to appreciate appreciate the similarities and differences between the ways in which 'nouveaux romans', Oulipian novels, overtly postmodern novels and more recent auto-fictional texts adopt aspects of detective fiction in order to explore questions of epistemology and hermeneutics;
Students will be able to explore the ways in which the aspects of genre fiction and literary fiction interact;
Students will be able to develop the ability to analyse theoretical and literary works which employ elements of genre fiction in their exploration of epistemological and hermeneutic questions
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