Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-7qhmt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T05:42:33.215Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Lasting Lure of the Asian Mystery

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Extract

Among the numerous accolades and awards garnered by viet thanh nguyen's debut novel, the sympathizer (2015), the one receiving the least attention from academic critics will probably be the Edgar Award, bestowed by the Mystery Writers of America. After all, The Sympathizer boasts aesthetic achievements that far exceed the generic confines of a conventional mystery novel. Also, even in the age of cultural studies, when the divide between the popular and the elite is supposed to have all but disappeared, literary scholars, if they are honest with themselves, still hang on to the notion that there is a qualitative difference, or a hierarchy, separating literary fiction from crime fiction, the highbrow from the lowbrow. It may be true that we no longer live at a time when an eminent critic like Edmund Wilson would attack mystery novels by asserting, as he did in 1945, partly in response to Agatha Christie's popular mystery novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, that “with so many fine books to read …; there is no need to bore ourselves with this rubbish” (qtd. in Bradford 117). And there is more than half a century separating us from the era when Ross Macdonald, one of the most accomplished practitioners of the mystery genre as well as a trained literary scholar, lamented in his 1954 lecture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he had received a doctoral degree in English, that “[t]hough it is one of the dominant literary forms of our age, the mystery has received very little study” (11). Even after Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida enshrined Edgar Allan Poe's detective short story “The Purloined Letter” as a darling of poststructuralist analysis, most literary scholars worth their salt would continue to regard crime fiction as a subpar genre, something that, as Macdonald said, is reserved for their leisure hours, akin to crossword puzzles in a newspaper (11). Or, as Wilson put it, “Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?” (qtd. in Bradford 117).

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2018

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bradford, Richard. Crime Fiction: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cha, Cha Theresa Hak. DICTEE. U of California P, 2009.Google Scholar
Chen, Tina. Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture. Stanford UP, 2005.Google Scholar
Chiu, Monica. Scrutinized! Surveillance in Asian North American Literature. U of Hawai'i P, 2014.Google Scholar
Harte, Bret. “The Heathen Chinee.” Western News Company, 1870.Google Scholar
Huang, Yunte. Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History. W.W. Norton, 2010.Google Scholar
Lee, Chang-rae. Native Speaker. Riverhead Books, 1995.Google Scholar
Macdonald, Ross. “The Scene of the Crime.” Inward Journey, edited by Sipper, Ralph B., Mysterious Press, 1984, pp. 1134.Google Scholar
Nguyen, Viet Thanh. The Sympathizer. Paperback ed., Grove Press, 2015.Google Scholar
O'Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. edited by Fitzgerald, Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970.Google Scholar
Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Duke UP, 1999.Google Scholar
So, Richard Jean. “Literary Information Warfare: Eileen Chang, the US State Department, and Cold War Media Aesthetics.” American Literature, vol. 85, no. 4, 2013, pp. 719–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Szendy, Peter. All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage. Translated by Végsô, Roland, Fordham UP, 2017.Google Scholar