Overview
- Utilizes detective fiction to demonstrate theories of truth based on intersubjectivity
- Draws from the fields of American studies, American literature, rhetoric, and philosophy
- Examines the post-truth era connecting historical, theoretical, and literary analysis to real-world events
Part of the book series: Crime Files (CF)
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About this book
Truth to Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction examines questions of truth and relativism, turning to detectives, both real and imagined, from Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin to Robert Mueller, to establish an oblique history of the path from a world where not believing in truth was unthinkable to the present, where it is common to believe that objective truth is a remnant of a simpler, more naïve time. Examining detective stories both literary and popular including hard-boiled, postmodern, and twenty-first century novels, the book establishes that examining detective fiction allows for a unique view of this progression to post-truth since the detective’s ultimate job is to take the reader from doubt to belief. David Riddle Watson shows that objectivity is intersubjectivity, arguing that the belief in multiple worlds is ultimately what sustains the illusion of relativism.
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Keywords
Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
"Watching the detectives with David Riddle Watson is a philosophical journey through post-truth America. With Watson as our guide, Heidegger converses with Holmes while Peirce tangles with Poe’s purloined letter. This book leaves no doubt that the art of detecting the truth is at the heart of a functioning democracy. Truth to Post Truth in American Detective Fiction turns everyone who cares about the future of democracy into philosophical detectives.”
—Jeffrey R. Di Leo, author of The End of American Literature and Catatrophe
—Jeffrey R. Di Leo, author of The End of American Literature and Catatrophe
“Deftly juxtaposing the history of epistemological thought, the evolution of the detective genre, and Trump's presidency, David Watson shows how recent detective stories hint at ways that we can build upon shared assumptions about reality—even in a contemporary American culture rife with "alternative facts, " "fake news," conspiracy theories, and cynical distortions of the truth.”
—Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities, College of the Holy Cross
“This lively and engaging book traces the networks of thought about what is real and what is not from the Vietnam War through the end of the Cold War and the rise of the “post-truth” moment of our present day. Watson finds the figure of the detective useful in thinking through how we understand our relation to knowledge and draws on Poe, Borges, Delillo, and Mieville, and The Wire. With its brilliant connections, this book leads us to the profound insight that investigation, as we know it from the world of detective narrative, has been replaced with production—the spinning of tenuous “truths” in the conspiracy theories and the political rhetoric of the Trump administration. With its original and incisive framing, it offers us a hopeful concept of a cosmopolitanism rooted in an allegiance to the concept of a unified reality, one that can be plumbed for truths about the world and the greater truth of shared communal experience.”
—Catherine Ross Nickerson edited The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction and is the author of The Web of Iniquity: Early Detective Fiction by American Women
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
David Riddle Watson is English and Humanities Instructor at Central Carolina Community College in Sanford, NC, USA, where he has taught since 2005. He received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2019. His research examines the intersection of philosophy, rhetoric, and contemporary American literature.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Truth to Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction
Authors: David Riddle Watson
Series Title: Crime Files
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87074-4
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-87073-7Published: 26 October 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-87076-8Published: 27 October 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-87074-4Published: 25 October 2021
Series ISSN: 2947-8340
Series E-ISSN: 2947-8359
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVII, 218
Topics: Contemporary Literature, North American Literature, Literature, general, Metaphysics, Crime and the Media, American Culture