文學研究的地位直到今日仍然備受爭議。相對於自然科學及社會科學，文學研究似乎仍缺乏系統化的方法學或實用價值來證明自身的重要性。文學研究者應該如何面對此一形勢，又該如何在當下延續文學研究？本論文將藉由欣賞愛倫坡(Edgar Allan Poe)與波赫士(Jorge Luis Borges)的偵探小說來探討這個問題。在本文將德曼(Paul de Man)於〈盲點的修辭學〉(“The Rhetoric of Blindness”)的討論重新引介至偵探小說的討論之餘，此一賞析不僅觸及小說文類的問題，也同時有助於思考文學帶來的衝擊以及批評者在當中的角色扮演。
德曼於〈盲點的修辭學〉一文中，展示了文學如何衝擊著批評者的reading:一方面文學文本的修辭性(rhetoricity)引發誤讀，另一方面誤讀的存在也暗示了在文本與批評者之間存在著一種「相互依存」的關係。藉由賞析愛倫坡與波赫士的偵探小說，本文探討了這些小說在呈現解謎方法與偵探勝利這一方面的特殊性，而這些特殊的呈現方式再次展現了文學所帶給讀者的衝擊：愛倫坡的偵探小說突顯偵探小說的修辭性(rhetoricity)引發誤讀，而波赫士的〈死亡與指南針〉(“Death and the Compass”)所呈現的罪犯與偵探的互動也呼應了文學與批評者的關係。藉由分析這些小說的互文關係，本文更進一步解釋文學與批評者的關係：由於誤讀其實同時影響文學與批評者，故誤讀對於文學本身亦無可避免，批評者的誤讀對於文學也同樣造成衝擊。因而批評者仰賴文學文本並非象徵文學批評的終結，而是文學研究的起點。文學研究者應當深切思考文學所帶來的衝擊，因其背後可能暗示批評reading此一工作的問題。文學研究的重要性，也唯有仰賴此一反省的態度才得以彰顯和存續。

At the present time, we still find that the status of literary study remains in question. In comparison with natural sciences and social sciences, literary study is somehow unable to justify itself as a profession with a systematic methodology or a direct contribution to the world. Then how should a literary critic react to this situation, and how should literary study sustain itself in the present day? This essay is to reconsider these questions through reading the detective stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Jorge Luis Borges. While it reintroduces Paul de Man’s “The Rhetoric of the Blindness” into the discussion of the detective story, it touches on the problem of the detective story as a literary genre, and by doing so it will help us to reflect on the challenge brought by literature and the critic’s role in the present context of literary study.
In “The Rhetoric of Blindness,” de Man demonstrates how literature challenges the critic: on one hand, the rhetoricity of literary text inevitably causes misreading; on the other hand, the critic’s inevitable misreading reaffirms the mutual dependence between the literary text and the critic. Through reading the detective stories written by Poe and Borges, I suggest that the detective story is unique in presenting the detective’s method and his success, and this genre also challenges its reader: in the case of Poe, the rhetoricity of the detective story revealed through the detective’s method and the detective’s success again makes the story potentially misread. Nonetheless, Borges’s “Death and the Compass” prefigures the relationship between literary text and the critic through the timeless rivalry between the detective and the criminal. However, through reexamining the intertextual relationship of these detective stories, I show that misreading is inevitable both to the text and the critic. Therefore, reintroducing de Man into the discussion of the detective story explains further the implication of the relationship between literary text and the critic. Since the critic’s misreading is also a challenge to literature, the critic’s inevitable dependence on literature should not be taken as the end of literary criticism but rather be very basis of the critic’s work. Literary critics, in this manner, should seriously consider the implication of the challenge brought by literature, which may suggest some problem about the critical reading. It is this act of the reflection that will justify the critic’s work, the text he reads, and literary study as well.

Introduction: The Abyss and the Ground
Chapter 1 The Frame of the Critic
Chapter 2 The Frame of the Detective
Chapter 3 The Play of the Detective Story
A Closing Remark: Nothing Succeeds Like a Success

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