Interpretive Frenzy. On the Appeal Structure of Paranoid Narrative in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries.

Dissertation, nominated for NYU’s Outstanding Dissertation Award

ProQuest, New York University ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2025. 32122788.

Abstract:

This dissertation examines paranoia as a mode of reading. It poses a question rooted specifically in literary and rhetorical form: how do modern texts compel their readers to read paranoically? The central thesis is that interpretive mania (Deutungswut) results from a specific mode of textual address (Appellstruktur), which I refer to as the paranoid imperative. This imperative—whose concrete forms are examined through the forensic writings of French criminologist Edmond Locard, the literary works of Franz Kafka, and the conspiracy theories of Kayvan Soufi-Siavash—urges readers to uncover hidden truths based on the assumptions that nothing is as it seems, nothing happens by chance, and everything is interconnected. As I demonstrate, the obsessive deciphering of hidden signs and patterns becomes a method in its own right in each of the examined cases: as a forensic approach, a literary paradigm of representation, and a conspiratorial mode of adversarial inquiry. From a reception-focused perspective, however, these texts do more than simply exemplify or reflect interpretive mania—they actively evoke it. While scholarship has largely characterised paranoia as an epistemology driven solely by negative affect, I argue that a closer examination of the specific mode of textual address underpinning such reading practices demonstrates that paranoid reading is equally motivated by a positive economy of desire: a particular drive towards knowledge, inquiry, and play, and a distinct pleasure in narrative. Paranoia, I argue, thus functions as an epistemology where the pleasure in revealing what is hidden is regarded as evidence of the truth of the revelation.

“Speculative Forensics: Suspicion and Imagination in Edmond Locard’s The Criminal Investigation and its Scientific Methods

(Peer-Reviewed)

History of Science and Humanities, Vol. 48 (3), (2025): 227 – 245 . doi.org/10.1002/bewi.70003.

"Prudence avoids mistakes, but imagination leads to success."

(Edmond Locard)

Abstract

Edmond Locard's L'enquête criminelle et les méthodes scientifiques marks a pivotal moment in criminology's transformation from a largely unmethodical practice to a scientific discipline. While Locard is best known for advancing laboratory methods of forensic analysis, this article argues that at the heart of his conception of forensics lies the assertion that it is not rationality, but vivid imagination that makes or breaks the criminal investigation. Following Locard's claim that one of the most crucial challenges in teaching forensics is to introduce fellow criminologists to the art of using intuition and creativity for problem-solving, this article examines the concrete ways in which L'enquête criminelleattempts to actively engage the reader's imaginative faculty by presenting problems that can only be solved through “lateral thinking” and “abductive reasoning.” To introduce his speculative methods, I argue, Locard borrows from detective fiction in two ways: Firstly, he counterfactually presents literary case studies by Poe as real-world cases, endorsing Dupin's detective technique as a viable criminological practice. By planting hidden clues and red herrings in semiotic puzzles to be deciphered by the reader, secondly, Locard appropriates narrative techniques to sharpen his reader's hermeneutics instincts.

“Abortive Building Attempts:” Poetics of Undoing in Kafka’s The Burrow Manuscript

(In submission)