ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book begins with Fredric Jameson's swipe at the nouveau roman, its contemporaries and successors, aiming its criticism squarely at pastiche: 'The architecture is generally a great improvement; the novels are much worse'. It offers an alternative view of pastiche, figuring it as a valid and interesting form of literature in its own right. The book shows how themes of violence, torture, and death can be stripped of moral and emotive resonance in their fiction, to be treated with casual levity in Jean Echenoz or salacious sadism in Robbe-Grillet. It further shows how crime fiction's structural formulas are exploited by the pasticheurs to create generalized narratological critiques. Aided by the genre's inherent tendency towards reflexivity, the pasticheurs' deconstruction of narrative Systems of connection and closure raises questions about the imposition of meaning and causality on events depicted in fiction.
