Provide a 2 pages analysis while answering the following question: Reponse paper 2. Prepare this assignment according to the guidelines found in the APA Style Guide. An abstract is required.

Provide a 2 pages analysis while answering the following question: Reponse paper 2. Prepare this assignment according to the guidelines found in the APA Style Guide. An abstract is required. Differences between metaphysical detective fictions Metaphysical detective stories disclose much about the relation of postmodernism to modernism and of high to low literary culture. Therefore, metaphysical detective story helps us to question the limits of our knowledge, fiction, narrative, subjectivity, the nature of reality, hence coming up with rational interpretation. Thus, Poe depicts us that any metaphysical detective must “search for the key to the ordered, ultra-rational world of the detective story”. As a result, our ratiocinative process should address the unfathomable epistemological question and ontological. Therefore, metaphysical is different from traditional detective fictions as “metaphysical”, according Italian surrealist painters: “is a works that use fabulous elaborate ironies, incongruous juxtapositions, symbols, and self-reflexive pastiche to indicate that “reality” is ultimately unknowable or at least ineffable” (María, pg. 4). While traditional detective fictions as endorse irrational for it does inculcate the sense of reason which finds its highest expression in “The Purloined Letter.” In relation to that, we can depict that traditional detective fictions concentrate on setting goal is to solve the mystery and find the truth and detective attempt to view case objectively.

In relation to the above explanation, we can depict the concept of metaphysical is advocating that the mind, given enough time, can understand everything. As a consequence, Poe to apprehend that “There are no mysteries, there is only incorrect reasoning” (Michael Pg 141) subsequently, metaphysical is different from traditional detective fictions as metaphysical advocate for detective approach that has no specific goal and one that questions only lead to more questions. Additionally, Metaphysical encourage detectives to view cases subjectively, believing there is no objective solution. Hence, we are able to understand that why Poe calls for the use of metaphysical detective approach as it “nurtures a culture which most exercises the imagination of intellectuals” (Michael, 143).

Therefore, metaphysical detective story helps us become conscious of whom a person is and its densest world unlike traditional detective fictions which most important relationships are between detective and suspects. Moreover, traditional detective fictions has “dramatizing the limits of reasoning by experimenting with such irrational modes as myth and the subconscious, that the lower reaches of literature were dramatizing the power of reason in such figures as Inspector Poirot and Ellery Queen”( Michael,147). This can be detected as detective use traditional detective fictions to gains information from meaningful clues and assume other clue which may later turn to be meaningful. What’s more, Robbe-Grillet points out that “The aesthetics of Post-Modernism is militantly antipsychological and radically anti-mythical. It is about things, not people” (Michael, 148). Therefore, Post-Modernism utilizes detective stories by expanding and changing certain possibilities in them, just as Modernism had customized the potentialities of myth.

Thus, it is a responsibility of Metaphysical detective stories to build a literature which takes elaborate ironies, incongruous juxtapositions, symbols, and self-reflexive into account. However, after reading about Jennifer’s suicide we can appreciate why Wallace Stevens define the traditional function of all art as "the violence from within which protects us from the violence without" (Michael, pg. 156). Thus, as Borges and Robbe-Grillet have put it “if, in the detective story death must be solved, in the new metaphysical detective story it is life which must be solved” (Michael, pg. 155).

Works Cited

Michael Holquist. “Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction.” The Johns Hopkins University Press (1971). Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/468384

María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro “Journal of Narrative Theory 40.1 (Winter 2010): 108–128. Copyright © 2010 by Published by Eastern Michigan University.