| dc.description.abstract | My dissertation explores detective fiction in Chile and Cuba that began in the late eighties and nineties in two series that have continued up to the present. The detective story in Latin America known as the neopolicial, a term coined by the father of the genre, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, serves as a narrative tool that Ramón Díaz Eterovic and Leonardo Padura Fuentes utilize for their respective collections. Each saga witnesses the development of an unusual investigator: the protagonists Heredia in the Chilean series and Mario Conde in the Cuban series.
Each detective serves as a witness to their ever-changing community throughout the collections of which they are the protagonist, often challenging the official history in Chile and Cuba while maintaining a striking relationship with literature. It is precisely their relationship with literature that is the focus of this study, as it serves the main characters in a variety of ways: literature is the source from which they build their code of ethics, their refuge from exterior reality, their mode of understanding the world around them, and influences the way they approach their investigations as well as the manner in which they conceive their own existence.
Eight novels are analyzed in this project: La ciudad está triste (1987), Pasado Perfecto (1991), El hombre que pregunta (2002), Adiós, Hemingway (2003), La oscura memoria de las armas (2008), La neblina del ayer (2005), Los fuegos del pasado (2016) and Herejes (2013). In each chapter, I analyze the development of the main characters, exploring different aspects of their relationship with literature and their society. In the final chapter of this study, I explore the concept of expansion in the neopolicial in each saga, demonstrating the small-scale expansion that Díaz Eterovic displays in this most recent novel Los fuegos del pasado and also the departure from the neopolicial in Padura Fuentes’ hybrid work, the novel Herejes. | en_US |
