Abstract:
My approach to the vampire detective highlights its connections to the private detective's
story and reveals the monstrous investigators' debt to early feminist forms of detection -specifically
in their reformation of the' other' and of traditional forms of power and
authority. Seen in this light the movement of horror's imaginary 'other' into the rational
world of detection can be seen as not an abrupt breach of detection's realist conventions,
but an almost seamless transition into symbolic spaces that point to the detective's
primary function -- to make sense of the senseless. It is in this light that I explore the
monster that is a detective as a symbol that is also a sense-maker, and a quintessential
postmodern figure.
I argue that the distinctions between monsters and 'others', and between popular
narratives and postmodern religion have faded, culminating in a character that can not
only model 'otherness' as an exemplary condition, but also provide strategies for
modeling the form of active postmodern subjectivity that postmodern theorist Jim
Collins' (1989) conceives of as heretical activity.
