The detective story, focused on inquiries, and in its wake the spy
novel, built around conspiracies, developed as genres in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During the same period,
psychiatry was inventing paranoia, sociology was devising new forms of
causality to explain the social lives of individuals and groups and
political science was shifting the problematics of paranoia from the
psychic to the social realm and seeking to explain historical events
in terms of conspiracy theories. In each instance, social reality was
cast into doubt. We owe the project of organizing and unifying this
reality for a particular population and territory to the nation-state
as it took shape at the end of the nineteenth century. Thus the figure
of conspiracy became the focal point for suspicions concerning the
exercise of power. Where does power really lie, and who actually holds
it? The national authorities that are presumed to be responsible for
it, or other agencies acting in the shadows - bankers, anarchists,
secret societies, the ruling class? Questions of this kind provided
the scaffolding for political ontologies that banked on a doubly
distributed reality: an official but superficial reality and its
opposite, a deeper, hidden, threatening reality that was unofficial
but much more real. Crime fiction and spy fiction, paranoia and
sociology - more or less concomitant inventions - had in common a new
way of problematizing reality and of working through the
contradictions inherit in it. The adventures of the conflict between
these two realities - superficial versus real - provide the framework
for this highly original book. Through an exploration of the work of
the great masters of detective stories and spy novels - G.K.
Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Le Carré and Graham Greene among
others - Boltanski shows that these works of fiction and imagination
tell us something fundamental about the nature of modern societies and
the modern state.
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Detective Stories, Spy Novels and the Making of Modern Societies
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780745683447
Publisert
2014
Utgave
1. utgave
Utgiver
Vendor
Polity
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Antall sider
320
Forfatter