Document Type
Review
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Like many of the critical, scholarly investigations of detective fiction that I have read, Maria Plochocki's Constructing Knowledge begins with the now-familiar claim that the genre continues to be among those relegated to the spaces outside of "legitimate," established or even good literature (7). However, where Plochocki differs from most of her predecessors and contemporaries is in recognizing that the genre does attract considerable attention and in turning the focus of her study to the body. The two seem a fitting pair because detective fiction clearly constitutes something of a guilty pleasure among scholars and these kinds of pleasures constitute so much of the corpus of detective fiction. To be sure, Plochocki also hauls out another pair of guilty pleasures for scholars, namely the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and the semiotic analysis of Roland Barthes.
Repository Citation
Ouellette, Marc A.. "Review of Body, Letter, and Voice: Constructing Knowledge in Detective Fiction, by Maria Plochocki." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 10, no. 2, 2010, pp. 1–3. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol10/iss2/12