Detectives, Criminals, and Writers in Latin American Fiction

Catalog description

Born as a sub-genre, crime fiction (a denomination which encompasses a wide number of texts: classical detective stories, hard-boiled, true-crimes and the non investigative crime novel) has become one of the most attractive literary forms for writers, and one of the favorites for readers. Because it is built around topics like the crime and the law, the search of the truth and the unstable identity of the subject in mass societies, it has become an ideal vehicle for the expression of the anxieties and fears that dominate the contemporary culture. Its versatility has been used by many Latin-American authors to express the social and political conflicts of the continent, as well as to explore its literary possibilities through formal searches, characterized by parody, meta-literary and auto referential games. The aims of this course are, on the one hand, to offer a panoramic vision of the crime fiction in Latin America through the reading of some representative authors; and, on the other, to explore how they can be can be read from different theoretical approaches.