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theses

This dissertation examines how Hispanic Caribbean crime and detective fiction spanning the end of the twentieth century to the first decade of the twenty-first century pushes against classical conventions, modifies them to fit their social context, and some cases uproots the tenets of the genre altogether. I argue that crime fiction is indicative of the moral, social, and political values of a culture and its people, for it shows what crimes are acceptable and unacceptable through the representation of the processes of investigation and justice. In Chapter One I frame my reading of Virgilio Díaz Grullón’s “Crónica Policial,” Ana Lydia Vega’s “Pasión de historia,” Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá’s Sol de medianoche, and Leonardo Padura Fuentes’s Pasado Perfecto and Máscaras with models of classical detective fiction and theories of metafiction and postmodernism to show how they invert the mode of metafiction traditionally seen in the detective story and provoke the reader to question the relationship between fiction and reality. Chapter Two investigates the relationship between the Hispanic Caribbean detective and urban space in Sol de medianoche, Desamores (Wilfredo Mattos Cintrón), and Las puertas de la noche (Amir Valle Ojeda) and argues that they display an amalgamation of Baudelaire’s flâneur and de Certeau’s “practitioner” regarding their interaction with urban spaces. Like the flâneur, the detectives are active observers of their surroundings, but they are also actively engaged in their urban environments and give life and significance to their communities through their travels, observations, and resulting narratives. Similarly, the detectives featured in the third chapter are deeply entrenched in their milieu, which affects their cultural attitudes and professional investigations. I turn to theories of post-colonialism in my analysis of Candela by Rey Emmanuel Andújar and Que en vez de infierno encuentres gloria by Lorenzo Lunar Cardedo to reveal the detective as representing and negotiating the liminal space between oppressor and oppressed, thereby transcending the boundaries between authority and community and in so doing highlighting the dynamics of race, class, and social differences in the Hispanic Caribbean. In the final chapter I read Seva by Luis López Nieves, El crimen verde by Emilia Pereyra, and El hombre triángulo by Rey Emmanuel Andújar as works of crime and detective fiction even though they deviate radically from the normative structure of the genre by lacking either a detective or a crime. By putting these texts into dialogue, I illuminate how narratives utilize crime to portray the social realities of their time and place, as well as how they adapt and transform the detective genre, enabling the reader to understand the distinctive cultural complexities of the Hispanic Caribbean.

ETD_9260

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Melissa Lynn Widdis

doi:10.7282/t3-q6mc-3p74

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.