Date of Award

Spring 2025

Document Type

M.A. Essay

First Advisor

Antonio Gomez

Second Advisor

Miya Xie

Abstract

Detective fiction was once considered the pulpy, mass-consumed genre of a newly literate class with unrefined taste and an unquenchable desire for temporary withdrawal from the chaotically modernizing urban centers of the early 20th century. It has since transcended national boundaries to become a fully potentiated sect of world literature. As it traveled the world, local additions that imitated a recognizable form were imbued with distinct locality– detective fiction became both global and local, undertaking the universal questions of morality, law, order, and modernity in juxtaposition with the domestic circumstances that complicated them. This presentation places two detective stories in comparison, “The Death and the Compass” (“La muerte y la brújula”) by J.L. Borges (1942) and “The Sunglasses Society” (“眼镜会”) By Sun Liaohong 孙了红 (1921), analyzing where they conform to and transgress generic conventions. Drawing similarities between both the short stories themselves and the sociopolitcal climates of Argentina and China in which they were written, each story is understood as a commentary on how the teleologically oriented epistemological order of detective fiction unfolds in a local context. This presentation argues that by showing a fundamental failure of the inductive reasoning traditionally championed in detective fiction, these works present the dangers of applying an a priori reasoning detached from reality to the multifaceted cultural anxieties of countries with burgeoning senses of national identity.

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