The Detective and the Writer: The Postmodernist Re-Writing of Detective Fiction Conventions in PaulAusters City of Glass

This paper aims at exploring the application and subsequent subversion of the generic conventions of detective narrative in the Metaphysical Detective novel with particular reference to the first novel, City of Glass, in Paul Auster s The New York Trilogy (1990) which is exemplary work of this postmodernist subgenre. In addition to identifying these generic conventions and what happens to them the paper also seeks to pins point the specific postmodernist textual tactics and strategies that Auster, and other practitioners of the subgenre, employ in their subversion of the detective to explore such metaphysical issues as identity, reality, and the nature of authorship.