Detecting Globalization: America's Emerging Genre of Global Detective Fiction

My dissertation focuses on the contemporary incarnation of one of the novel's most enduring genres, detective fiction. I demonstrate that in portraying globalization through the lens of criminality, recent detective novels point the way for readers to grapple with economic, cultural, and technological facets of transnational exchange. Detecting Globalization brings contemporary American and international authors together to show the strategies one genre employs to mediate the contemporary world. Ultimately, the project demonstrates the ways in which the genre of detective fiction has adapted from its foundations as a national form to tailor itself to the shifting needs of twenty-first-century globalization.;In the first chapter of my project, I examine the recent explosion in two subgenres of contemporary detective fiction which have been read by critics as signaling the genre's decline, the multicultural and the postmodern, and reposition them as the genre struggling to deal with the forces of globalization. I bring popular novelists Michael Nava and Laurie R. King together with two high literary authors, Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem, to demonstrate that their vastly different novels work toward the same ends of adjusting concepts of borders, community, and solution to mediate globalizing forces.;Building on the ways that these texts avail themselves of the solution-centered genre of detective fiction, my second chapter focuses on how forensic detective fiction confronts the postmodern crisis of facticity. I argue that the recent boom of forensic novels use various forms of data analysis as strategies for attempting to contain global crime on the level of form as well as content. While crime becomes ever more corporate, forensic novelists like Patricia Cornwell work on techniques of individuation as others, like Kathy Reichs and Jeffrey Deaver, work on debunking an overreliance on facts. Yet whether or not these novels use facts as containment strategy or embrace a postmodern multiplicity of meanings, they rely on form to manage seemingly unmanageable global crimes.;In my third chapter, I use detective fiction to examine an underexplored facet of globalization, its temporal dimension, alongside the more frequently interrogated geographical and spatial aspects. I again bring high and popular literature together, reading Paul Auster alongside Tony Hillerman and Michael Connelly to explore the ways that globalization impacts both urban and rural landscapes through its manipulation of historicity and time. I use these novelists to demonstrate that while globalization continues to progress forward, it derives much of its power from an understanding and exploitation of the past.;In the fourth and final chapter, I read what I argue are the first members of a new genre of detective fiction, the global detective novel. I expand the project's scope, pairing British novelist John Burdett and international sensation Stieg Larsson to delineate what globalization ultimately facilitates in the detective: a figure capable of using technology to cross borders, create self-selecting communities, and interpret data without imposing solutions. In these ways, I argue, the genre of detective fiction reinvents itself to mediate the needs and crises of the 21st century.