Kryminalny teatr teorii Normana Hollanda
Norman Holland’s Crime Theatre of Theory

Summary/Abstract: This paper focuses on Death in a Delphi Seminar: A Postmodern Mystery (1995) by Norman N.Holland and the relationship between the novel and Holland’s version of the reader-responsetheory. What makes the novel interesting is its intertextual structure, theatralization ofacademic life and various incarnations of the author who plays with his own identity. Thetext is a combination, an amalgam of other texts, such as police tape transcripts, fragments ofa diary, letters, newspaper articles, student’s essays, etc. The author rewrites the conventionsof crime fiction in the style of an academic novel. The protagonist, Holland by name, is anartificer of an unconventional teaching method called “Delphi Seminar”, based on the analysisof students’ narrative responses to literary texts, just like the author himself. In the novel,the method, presented by real Holland in cooperation with Murray M. Schwartz in the KnowThyself: Delphi Seminars (2008), is used as a murder investigation method. The author of thispaper poses a question if Holland’s novel is mainly an advertisement of “Delphi Seminar” oran interesting academic mystery novel, or a serious voice in the theoretical debate on readerresponsecriticism, deconstruction and psychoanalysis in literary criticism.

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