The Assassin s novel: innovation and mischaracterization of the crime story

• Grant number: 14/23908-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: February 01, 2015
• End date: January 31, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Arnaldo Cortina
• Grantee: Ana Luisa Coletti Ricci
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Araraquara. Araraquara , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research project has as the study object a line of the crime novel, that we call "The assassin's novel", whose plot is narrated in first person by the character that plays the criminal role. In this research, there will be studied the characteristics of the crime novel to, posteriorly, analyze the relation of the "assassin's novel" with the genre that comes from, its impacts into this genre and what are the innovations that this "line" has brought to the criminal/detective novel from the XX and XXI centuries. Moreover, we will analyse the effects of sense produced by a crime novel whose narrator is the assassin to. There will be studied, under the perspective of the discursive semiotic, the following works: The murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie; Bufo & Spallanzani, Rubem Fonseca; Nêmesis, A. L. C.Ricci. This research want to show how much the "assassin's novel" has infringed the rules of the traditional crime novel when gives the function of telling the story and committing the crime to a narrator-character. The assassin's novel brings, yet, the formula proposed by Edgar Allan Poe of detective/investigator - crime - assassin/criminal, that will be explored along the research, nevertheless, infringes its rules and improves the sense effects of expectation and thriller provoked in the reader. The narration is much more deceiving to the reader than true with the facts, which are framed according to the narrator-character intentions of riding his/her fault.