‘The productive side of disappearance’: Re-imagining detective work as a psychological and cultural mode for reckoning with traumatic pasts

This thesis proposes that detective fiction is a highly adaptable genre, capable of driving narratives that frame political, historical and personal experiences of violence while complicating classical versions of the genre that understand crime as individual deviancy or a mystery to be resolved by logical inference. By closely analysing Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy, Roberto Bolaño’s Distant Star, W.G Sebald’s Austerlitz and Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder, I explore the capacity of the detective form to broach ontological and existential questions stemming from traumatic pasts – particularly how the past continues to define narratives of personal and cultural identity.