Vol. 09 No. 3, December 2010
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10222/31219
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Item Open Access Contents - Belphégor Vol 9 No 3(Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2010-12) Frigerio, VittorioItem Open Access Philippe Met : La lettre tue. Spectre(s) de l’écrit fantastique. Villeneuve d’Ascq : Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2009, 267 p. ISBN : 978-2-7574-0079-1(Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2010-12) Eygun, Francois-XavierItem Open Access Vessels, Joel E. Drawing France: French Comics and the Republic. Jackson, MI: Mississippi UP, 2010. ISBN 978-1-60473- 444-7. xii + 305 p.(Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2010-12) Ousselin, EdwardItem Open Access Adolfo Fattori Cronache del tempo veloce. Immaginario e Novecento. Napoli: Liguori,2010. 210 p. ISBN: 8820748754(Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2010-12) De Feo, LindaItem Open Access Si les gants noirs portaient des pancartes... Le giallo face à la politique(Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2010-12) Clerc, AdrienItem Open Access Hurcombe, Martin, and Simon Kemp eds. Sébastien Japrisot. The Art of Crime. New York: Rodopi, 2009. Coll. Faux Titre 329. 190 p. ISBN 978-90-420-2534-9(Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2010-02) Vernier-Larochette, BeatriceItem Open Access Eclipse, exil et survie du krimi en Allemagne nazie (1933-1945)(Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2010) Platini, VincentThe German Krimi from the Nazi period finds itself in an ambiguous ideological position: how does one narrate the crime and its resolution when delinquency is not to be mentioned under the Third Reich and the police becomes an outlaw? Contrary to what the critics have long allowed, the crime novel has neither been restrained nor muzzled by State Censorship. Despite the official discourse rendering it worthless, this literary production stayed significant and escaped from the strongest controls. The texts reflect that the ideological changes in the judicial system were effective and they were able to be transformed into instruments of propaganda, whether explicitly or not: the policeman overshadowed the delinquent. Nevertheless, while the criminals and their novels should have disappeared in the new Germany, they remained and it is this survival that produced a resistance movement. The Krimi symbolically exiled itself from the Nazi frame of reference and this relegation signified as much an annihilation of the criminal as a critical detachment with respect to the powers that be.Item Open Access Les Naufragés de l'intelligence: Un Polar noir(Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2010) Atcha, Philip AmangouaThis study is a reading of Les naufragés de l’intelligence [The Shipwrecked of Intelligence] by Ivory Coast writer Jean-Marie Adiaffi as a noir fiction detective novel. It demonstrates that Adiaffi’s text is built on the model of the police novel, precisely the black novel. Adiaffi’s detective novel emphasizes social problems and is to be seen as the mirror of society. Adiaffi’s text, a truly testimonial work, it is thus a “social autoscopy,” to borrow Françoise Naudillon’s expression. This aesthetics of the police novel reveals itself as an opportunity for the author to criticize his country’s society as well as the ills besetting it.Item Open Access Il romanzo poliziesco italiano, 1964-2007: La memoria tra noir, enigmi e post-fascismo(Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2010) Tirinanzi de Medici, CarloItalian detective stories have strong ties with noir fiction since the beginning of the Sixties. Among other cultural issues, the rapid industrialization of Italy after the Second World War and all its subsequent phenomena were pivotal for genre literature. Giorgio ?erbanenco describes a rural country abruptly transformed in a First World nation, where old rules and values are no more and greed and violence took over. From this (quite conservative) point of view ?erbanenco develops a complex and stratified writing which deals with complicated issues. Leonardo Sciascia deals with society and its hypocrisy and omertà (conspiracy of silence) by means of a detective novel where the perpetrators and instigators are not found. Sciascia was the first genre novelist who openly attacked the governing party and denounced the legacy of Fascism in post-war, democratic society. Contemporary writers such as Carlo Lucarelli and Francesco Guccini-Loriano Machiavelli combine elements from both authors and created a new wave of detective stories. In books such as Carta bianca and Tango e gli altri, they explore pivotal moments of history. There is a need in contemporary society for an historical account of many recent facts because of a revisionist attempt by many politicians to minimize negative aspects of the past. For these authors, it is more important to explain the past and build a collective memory than to denounce political and economic contradictions directly.Item Open Access Quelle fin pour Pedro McEvoy? Le Dénouement renoué de Rue des Boutiques Obscures(Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2010) Duriez, ShawnThe narrative conventions which underlie and structure the detective novel’s intrigue have been the object of pastiches, parodies and ironic subversions in a number of important works of the last half century. From Gommes by Robbe-Grillet to Dondog by Volodine, the clear separation between the investigation’s “present but insignificant” and the crime’s “absent but true” story (Todorov) is explicitly and systematically blurred, assimilating the story of the “true” to that of the “insignificant,” that is to say, to the incidental, to that which does not have immediate significance or sense in and of itself. Through a case study of Rue des Boutiques Obscures (1978) by Patrick Modiano, this article examines the deconstruction of the narrative structures of the detective story as a vehicle for reflection about identity. His principal thesis is that by subverting the narrative logic of the detective novel in order to make a paradoxical story about the impossibility of recounting, the novel becomes a reproduction of a postmodern vision of the world, marked by scepticism towards the possibility of completely and unequivocally deciphering the enigma of existence to the world. In so doing, Modiano’s novel proposes that (individual and collective) history is an ephemeral construction which aims to momentarily appease the vertigo of existence by giving a foundation to identity, all the while including and exposing the truth about its own artificiality.Item Open Access Le Polar politique: L'é/Etat d'Hózhó dans les romans policiers de Tony Hillerman(Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2010) Rouffanche-Pericat, CecileThe concepts defining politics refer to human organizations that legislate rules for people living together in a society. The main purpose is to live in the most harmonious way as possible. It is this search for harmony (Navajo word: Hózhó) that urged Tony Hillerman (1925-2008) to write ethnologic detective novels that take place on the Navajo reservation in the Four Corners area in the American Southwest. The investigations of Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Officer Jim Chee allow readers to travel through the “Navajo Rez” and to catch a glimpse of the Indian world which is surrounded and invaded by White Anglo representations and codes. As a result, in Hillerman’s world, both real and fictitious cohabitate; Listening Woman, a Navajo Sacred Being, happens to be in the same room as the actor for a CocaCola ad. How does one adapt, evolve and survive in a place which is described as a global post modern area where antagonistic cultures are thrown together? Among social, political, philosophical dysfunctions and Indian stereotypes, the investigators try to reach Hózhó, the Navajo central concept for the existential quest that should lead everyone to Harmony and Beauty. The first part of the article reveals the political organizations at stake in Navajoland, the second explains what the Hózhó’s/State consists of, and the last describe a utopian Hózhó-ification of America.Item Open Access Ecriture d'une histoire politique à travers le polar militant en Argentine(Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2010) Orssaud, GenevieveItem Open Access Crímenes para armar: amuleto de Roberto Bolaà±o(Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2010) Ferrer, CarolinaTwentieth century Argentine literature plays with genre. From the military junta’s dictatorship whose violence and clandestineness provoked historiography’s interruption in 1976, we discover a number of novels that closely resemble the detective novel, with the difference being that only the reader can resolve the mystery: the country’s history, going against the official History instated by a police-like power. These narrations also play the role of living memory, which, while it is delivered to the reader, must also be borne and transmitted by him. If often the historical events detailed in these novels are about the state’s violence, some authors of detective novels pay testimony to the militancy. This paper looks particularly at Rolo Díez and Raúl Argemí, since they were militants in the ERP, the People’s Revolutionary army, the armed faction of the Revolutionary Labour Party. We will underscore the characteristics of the militant writing and observe that these surviving warriors, through the detective novel, offer a testimony on the violent acts of the Seventies and, especially, a political history and a reaffirmation of their militant values.Item Open Access Padura, creando desde el presente la memoria del futuro(Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2010) Campirano, ManuelInterview with Leonardo Padura Fuentes.Item Open Access Le Polar maghrébin sous la plume de Yasmina Khadra: Comment l'enquàªte policière devient enquàªte politique...(Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2010) Canu, ClaudiaIn the context of a reflection which is centred around the relationship between the detective novel and politics, the works of Yasmina Khadra constitute an important example which merits attention; because of the contend of his novels and his profoundly intricate use of this literary genre, the words of the author become a tool capable of describing the complex socio-historical reality of his country. By going through the socio-political history of Algeria in a transversally, from the postcolonial period through the 1990s, the author places himself in the position of a person who is transmitting the collective memory of his country. Even as he holds to a critical and disenchanted point of view, this writer describes the intricate relationships that constitute Algerian social fibre by making this extremely heterogeneous reality intelligible to his readers. The themes and structure of detective novels in general often demonstrate an ideological reconstruction of a socio-historical situation; here lies the specific interrogation on the way in which these internal literary processes are brought alive by the writer through his power to use specific and personal details in a way that demonstrates a much more ample and universal dimension of his society, even as he denounces it. (Translated by Mical Neill)Item Open Access Roman policier ou roman politique: Le Polar selon Sciascia(Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2010) Prigent, GaelLeonardo Sciascia’s oeuvre is related to both politics and the detective genre. The reader is thus invited to consider the possibility of a link between these two essential components and to study his novels from that point of view, as political detective novels of the 1970s. What is denounced by most of the author’s writings is actually the mob-like organisation of Italian society, corrupted by the secret bonds between mafia, the elite, and politicians (especially those who belong the D. C.) But beyond that, Sciascia’s fight for justice and truth comes to be the result of a political, and almost metaphysical, process, which questions what appears as a difference between a supposed absolute justice, divine or not, that alone could reach the truth and another justice, excessively human, which could not reach the truth, and then would tolerate lies. That is the reason why parody becomes the very language and favourite trope of the author, whether polar parody or parody of reality: the point is to turn reality inside out and to reveal its backward truth, to make literature another means to achieve justice or, in other words, moral and political truth.Item Open Access La Fièvre dans le sens(Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2010) Casta, IsabelleAs the enhanced echo chamber of a society, of its complexities and its world of representations, the thriller prefers private individual conflicts to collective tensions. But beyond the drama and interpersonal conflicts, some recent novels renew with the social thread of Eugène Sue and Paul Féval, using private misfortune to denounce the political retroactive loops which bring the typical individual to the "Zero hour" so dear to Agatha Christie. Whether it be the zero hour of Philip Kerr's berliner trilogy, the zero hour of a young jamaican forced into crime by Elizabeth George, the zero hour of the Black Dahlia for James Ellroy or Fabio Montale’s in J.C. Izzo’s trilogy, it is this very turning point, absolutely personal but arrived at through thousands of collective connections, that this paper attempts to bring to light.Item Open Access Rodolfo Walsh ou le polar de la résistance péroniste(Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2010) Thomas, Jean BaptisteRodolfo Walsh is a writer little known outside Argentina. Considered by some critiques as a simple journalist and not as a writer, he always maintained a confrontational relationship with detective novel. This article analyzes two of Walsh’s major works, Operación Masacre and ¿ Quién mató a Rosendo ?, in the light of politics and Argentinean literature of the Fifties and the Sixties. We examine how Walsh inaugurates a new genre: the hard boiled of the Peronist resistance in order to show how both novels can be considered as the literary prodrome (premonitory symptom ) inseparable of the politico-military activist engagement of a whole generation, from the end of the Sixties on.Item Open Access El (des)orden social y la representación del castigo en la ficción de Sara Paretsky(Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2010) Ramon-Torrijos, MarThe concepts defining politics refer to human organizations that legislate rules for people living together in a society. The main purpose is to live in the most harmonious way as possible. It is this search for harmony (Navajo word: Hózhó) that urged Tony Hillerman (1925-2008) to write ethnologic detective novels that take place on the Navajo reservation in the Four Corners area in the American Southwest. The investigations of Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Officer Jim Chee allow readers to travel through the “Navajo Rez” and to catch a glimpse of the Indian world which is surrounded and invaded by White Anglo representations and codes. As a result, in Hillerman’s world, both real and fictitious cohabitate; Listening Woman, a Navajo Sacred Being, happens to be in the same room as the actor for a CocaCola ad. How does one adapt, evolve and survive in a place which is described as a global post modern area where antagonistic cultures are thrown together? Among social, political, philosophical dysfunctions and Indian stereotypes, the investigators try to reach Hózhó, the Navajo central concept for the existential quest that should lead everyone to Harmony and Beauty. The first part of the article reveals the political organizations at stake in Navajoland, the second explains what the Hózhó’s/State consists of, and the last describe a utopian Hózhó-ification of America.Item Open Access Le Roman policier: Témoin de l'histoire politique zimbabwéenne(Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2010) Ferreira-Meyers, KarenThe political thriller reveals facts above all. The politicization of the crime novel (Rohrback, 2007) allows authors to go beyond a more sociological description of their societies to denounce “the situation of the dominated completely controlled by the dominators.” At the height of political problems in Zimbabwe, Glenn Macaskill, former member of the Rhodesian police service, publishes King's Gold (2003), a work of fiction based on informative facts. This political thriller gives an overview of politics in Rhodesia-Zimbabwe between 1980 and 2000 and thus also traces the tragic history of the Ndebele genocide (during Operation Gukurahundi or 'purifying rains') in Matabeleland and its socio-political consequences on the region. The reader discovers a criminal intrigue through typical African literary themes (superstition, witchcraft and legend), mixed with key themes of crime writing (murder, bravery, treason and romantic love). Situated in a country on the verge of total anarchy, this novel is a crude witness to the process of referendum, presidential elections and the difficult reality of the third millennium. A comparison with crime novels written by Robb W.J. Ellis (Without Honour) and Gordon Thomas Orr (Grasping the Nettle), amongst others, highlights the importance of the political thriller in an instable geopolitical region with a dictatorial regime: it gives a voice to those who do not have one – or only have a very small voice – so that they can denounce the atrocities of contemporary society.