RELATO POLICIAL Y EL CRIMEN QUE LO HABITA

the emergence of publicity and of serialized novels in the covers of french newspapers, since 1836, characterizes the relation between crime story and new modes of visibility for information in industrialized societies. a few examples, coming from a journal of that time, the “gazette des tribunaux”, allow us to demonstrate that journalism was from the beginning related to literature, if it is not a derivation from it. edgar allan poe, creator of crime story, leads the rhetoric of morbid fascination developed by dante, swift, lautréamont and baudelaire, from an appeal to the reader, toward the order of argument and the procedure that provides its structure. in crime story the discourse of what is told, that characterizes literature, and the discourse of science, live together, but the latter takes the place of the former only apparently, shaping in this way its rhetoric.