This dissertation explores interpretation in detective fiction, in postmodernist parodies of detective fiction, and in various theoretical readings of the parodies themselves. It argues that metaphysical detective stories represent interpretation in the detective's attempt to solve the mystery, and the reader's attempt to interpret the text; that both attempts are unsuccessful suggests, however, that interpretation is inherently solipsistic.; Detective fiction is the simplest form of narrative, chapter one explains, because it emphasizes suspense, sequence, and closure; it is also the most self-conscious, because it tells the story of a crime, uncovered by the story of an investigation; it concerns interpretation, and it emphasizes the relationship between reader and writer. Thus the genre provides an ideal subtext for postmodernism, which conceives reality as a fictional construct.; Because of its self-consciousness, detective fiction inevitably involves intertextuality. Chapter two applies Lacanian deconstructions of Poe's "Purloined Letter" to the story's own appropriation: first Conan Doyle, and then Nabokov, purloined Poe's text, yet became vulnerable in turn. Nabokov, in particular, uses Poe's plot to parody detective fiction; thus purloined letters in metaphysical detective fiction ultimately represent the purloined genre itself.; Chapter three defines metaphysical detective stories by analyzing two interdependent principles--order and invention--which Borges saw in the genre, and which represent formula and violation, as well as cosmos and chaos. Borges' stories, in which detective and reader create meaning, rather than discover it, suggest that order itself is an invention.; Thus the first three chapters define metaphysical detective fiction, and its relationship to literary history (in terms of popular culture, modernism, and anxiety of influence). Subsequent chapters show how specific novels parody interpretation in and of detective fiction; these chapters also deconstruct various theoretical approaches to the genre. Chapter four explores the psychoanalytic theory that detective fiction relieves the reader's repressed memories of the primal scene; in Robbe-Grillet's novels, however, the reader confronts the text's own repression. Chapter five, using a Marxist approach, argues that Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 parodies American detective-story formulas, in particular, as cultural products which represent the nature of American reality. Chapter six shows how Eco's The Name of the Rose demonstrates his own semiotic theories of "open" and "closed" texts, and of model readers. More specifically, Eco's model reader knows the entire history of detective fiction, as well as the theoretical approaches (narratological, psychoanalytic, Marxist, and reader-response) to the genre. The Name of the Rose clearly illustrates, then, how postmodernism parodies detective fiction in order to explore the larger implications of interpretation itself.
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