L'enquête comme évocation du monde :
- Authors
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2007
- Source
- Cairn
- Keywords
- Language
- French
- License
- Unknown
- External links
Abstract
This article attempts to understand the role of the police in contemporary American culture. New York in the first half of the twentieth century (at the time of the police reform movement) is singled out as a test case in an effort to disentangle the intricate relationships between police realities and fictional representations. Noting the repeated references to Sherlock Holmes by reformers and drawing on JoAnne Brown’s and Carlo Ginzburg’s works, the author uses the paradigm of the investigation as a means of analyzing the ways the police—from both an individual and institutional viewpoint—entered the field of cultural representation. The article argues that what matters is not so much the positive or negative images of the police suggested by fictional representations, but the form in which those images are conveyed, namely investigational narratives when told from the standpoint of the police.
