Spatial, Temporal and Identity Labyrinths in American and French Metaphysical Detective Novels

The aim of this monograph is to explore spatial, temporal and identity labyrinths as central to the reading of Paul Auster’s, Patrick Modiano’s and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s texts. Although one cannot initially see any direct influential links between the three novelists whose examined texts were written in different periods and reflect diverse literary critical assumptions and philosophical schools, a careful scrutiny of American and French historical detective fiction studies and the genre’s critical background enables to situate the three authors in comparative configurations of the postmodern model of detective fiction, specifically a melange of the metaphysical hard-boiled variant and an existential neo-noir novel. Since one can barely trace any systematic critical works dedicated to the correlation between, as well as juxtaposition of, these writers, either in the context of the detective story tradition or the postmodern literary studies, my main objective is to closely inspect the three authors’ problematization of the categories of space, time and identity as reflections of textual constraints, urban labyrinths, memory lacunae, consciousness, self-reflexive storytelling, reader-response and reception theories.