[주홍색 연구] 읽기와 추리소설 쓰기

Reading A Study in Scarlet and Writing Detective Fiction—Poetic Justice and Practical Ethics

This essay examines how students both as readers and writers activate their own sense of art responsible for life in reading and writing detective fiction. The essay focuses on betrayal dominantly played out in both Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet read in class and detective stories produced afterwards in the course I taught. I argue that betrayal is a generic feature of detective fiction because it works out the game of mind-reading whose cognitive mechanism inference of internal mentality from external behavioral signs is directed by real-life empiricism. And I also demonstrate that ethical appeal is the primary means for enacting emotional solidarity between the authorial voice and the (implied) readers in bringing betrayal by villains or communal injustice to vengeful justice.