THE POTENTIALS OF CRIME FICTION

Date: October 23, 2017 - Monday

Time: 18:30-20:30

Venue: English Hall, Conference Center, Hongkou Campus

Language: English

Summary:

Detective story is a genre that is usually regarded as having begun with Edgar Allan Poe. Although this truism will be slightly challenged in the presentation, it is obvious that it is genre of the modernity. In the 19th century Central-European crime fiction was a complex genre, which will be illustrated with some examples, but in the first half of the 20th century it has been simplified with an exclusive focus on crime and investigation. It became a paradigm of bourgeois insecurity, which can be a reason why postmodernism took it as one of its master patterns. The postmodern anti detective fiction mainly aimed at challenging modern epistemological standard. In the beginning of the 21st century, however, the traditional genre is getting complex again, involving social and political issues that were previously only implicitly allowed to enter the fictional worlds of crime fiction.

Speaker Biography:

Péter Hajdu (1966, Budapest, Hungary) is academic advisor at the Institute for Literary Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, also professor at University of Pécs, Hungary, and the managing editor of Neohelicon, a major international journal on comparative literature studies. Member of advisory board of two international journals on literary studies.

He did extended research in the fields of comparative literature, theory of literature, and classical philology. From 2002 to 2009 he was a member of the ICLA’s Research Committee for East- and South-East Europe, between 2002 and 2012 he was the secretary of its Hungarian National Committee, 2008-2014 he was member of the standing research committee for literary theory, and since 2010 member of the ICLA Executive Council. He lectured at various universities in Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland, China and Japan. He has published 6 books and more than 100 papers.