Events
Upcoming Events
bRunCH, 13. 5. 2026
Eros & Thanatos of Detective Fiction: From Murder in the Gothic Novel of Mystery to the Function of Love in the Contemporary Detective Novel.
On Wednesday, May 13, at 10:00, philosopher and writer Mirt Komel from the Department of Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, will join us in lecture room P8 (Kompas) at bRunCH.
The title of his lecture is Eros & Thanatos of Detective Fiction: From Murder in the Gothic Novel of Mystery to the Function of Love in the Contemporary Detective Novel. The lecture takes as its starting point the short story Mademoiselle de Scuderi (Das Fräulein von Scuderi), written by E. T. A. Hoffmann in 1819 – well before the three detective stories by Edgar Allan Poe that paved the way for Arthur Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes. In this respect, the Romantic tradition of the Gothic novel can be understood as a precursor to detective fiction, which, through its further development, permutes four basic elements that can still be regarded today as the fundamental building blocks of the genre: victim (corpse), society (suspects), detective (investigator), and murderer (perpetrator).
What continuously accompanies the development of this genre as its shadow, undermining the logic of detective work from within, is precisely the reverse side of death, namely love.
You are warmly invited!