Los relatos policiales de Víctor Juan Guillot

<p>Comparative literary studies show that the detective genre today is one of the most popular genres of literature. This piece is an attempt to explore the detective story genre boundaries and ascertain attributes of this genre in the novel “A Secret History” by Donna Tartt. Today, detective literature provokes interest not only with readers, but also with literary critics. The research of works of the detective genre is carried out by such scientists as M.A.Bondarenko, M.Butor, I.V.Belozerova, S.Zizek, and many others; they investigate various aspects of detective literature: the place of literary pieces of the detective genre in mass and elite literature, engage in the development of typology of genres and subgenres, etc. The inverted detective story (another name is “howcatchim” is a detective story, mystery story, where the crime is delivered to the reader in the beginning of a story, and the identity of the perpetrator is usually shown to the reader as well. This is a story, where the reader has the advantage compare to the sleuth. There may also be subsidiary puzzles, such as why the crime was committed, but those are cleared up along the way. This format is the opposite of the more typical “whodunit”, where all of the details of the perpetrator of the crime are not revealed until the story’s climax. “A Secret History” by Donna Tartt deals with a number of issues that lie beyond the characteristics of any detective story. It deals with philosophical matters, with the eternal, sublime things. Some of those things are loss of self, control, horror; sublime and divine, etc. “A Secret History” by Donna Tartt, though possessing attributes of the detective story, namely an inverted detective story, due to the murder introduction in the beginning of narrative lacks main features of the detective story. It may structurally look like one, though it is not such in essence. The novel lacks a protagonist detective and antagonist detective, investigation process, evidence gathering, just or unjust sentence, perpetrators identity uncovering. One of the most significant features of a protagonist of the detective story is to be a hero (the definition of being hero may vary) and bring justice, which is not the case in Tartt’s novel.</p>

The essay offers a sociological analysis of the origin and popularity of the detective genre. There are many explanations for the phenomenon of the popularity of the detective genre, but they do not answer the question why the genre became relevant in the middle of the 19th century and remains so until now. Its genesis and role are interpreted in the middle and late 19th century and in the modern world. The moment when the detective genre emerged approximately coincides with the birth of classical sociological theories. Both sociology and the new literary genre are reflections on the changes that took place in the 19th century. The detective reflects current social problems and new technologies. The classic detective contains many typical features of positivist, functionalist, Weber and Marxist discourses. The essence of detective discourse is built into the ideas of faith in the scientific method and the morality of order, criticism of the capitalistic social system and the possibility of understanding social actions and motivation of different characters. The demand for a detective today is crucially connected with the rapid technological and social changes that take place today, and the Future Shock caused by them, described by Alvin Toffler. The pace of technological change is noticeably ahead of human adaptation to a new social reality. A person is forced to somehow endure or overcome this severe state for the psyche. Reading detective stories creates a short-term illusion of the possibility of mitigating and overcoming the Future Shock. However, reading or viewing a detective story does not provide a real chance to adapt to the liquid modernity.Such an important psychotherapeutic function is unique among literary and movie genres, so it can be predicted that detectives, despite the skepticism of many critics and intellectuals, will remain in demand and relevant in the future.

The influence of Edgar Allan Poe on North American culture and literature is still a subject of debate in contemporary literary theory. However, Poe’s creative legacy regarding the writings of Miriam Allen Deford remains neglected by the literary critics. Deford’s fiction explored a set of literary genres, such as biography, science fiction, crime and detective short stories. Taking these premises as a point of departure, this article aims to identify similarities between “A Death in the Family” and some of Poe’s works. Drawing on studies by J. T. Irwin, James M. Hutchisson and others, the objective of this paper is to analyze passages from Deford’s tale in comparison with the poetry and fictional prose of Poe. The analysis suggests that Deford’s horror short story “A Death in the Family,” published in 1961, was mostly inspired by Poe’s gothic tales, detective stories, and poems.

The article explores the genre paradigm of the novels by Guillaume Musso, the most popular author of unique detective novels in today’s France, which have already been translated into more than forty languages but have not yet been studied by literary criticism. The dissimilarity from the traditional genre content and canons of detective prose in its various modifications makes Guillaume Musso “someone else” (quelqu’un d’autre), results in his marginalization by literary scholars, whose name is included in the annals of canonical detective literature but is not represented in modern encyclopedias and dictionaries of detective stories. An analysis of the main trends and reasons for such a paradoxical situation is presented in the article. The purpose of the article is to reveal the features of the genre paradigm of the writer’s extraordinary detective novels, which is relevant both in the aspect of building new typologies of detective prose, and in the broader context of understanding French literature in the third millennium, and in the literary study of the original work of the most popular detective in France today, and in the theoretical analysis of the nature of mass culture and the mechanisms of its influence on the reader. The combination of intertextual, biographical, and typological research methods made it possible to identify features of the genre paradigm of Guillaume Musso’s works that differ from the traditional detective genre paradigm. The writer changes the plot-forming situation when the center of the intrigue is not the anatomy of a crime, but the anatomy of society, the analysis of the socio-psychological causes of the crime. Canonical for the system of detective prose characters, the figures of the investigator or detective, who act as representatives of state institutions that restore the just order of things, introduces doctors, writers, psychoanalysts, experts in the history of culture, whom the author imbues with “axiological neutrality”. The emphasis on paranormal phenomena transforms the artistic space of his works, in which an important place is given to a fantastic other space, where the souls of the dead and the living communicate. The combination of two antinomic genre constructions becomes programmatic for the writer: the novel as a love story, where the love intrigue is the plot-creating factor, and the detective story as a narrative of crime-solving. This genre innovation fundamentally distinguishes the genre paradigm of Musso’s novels from traditional detective stories. Importantly, unusual for various modifications of the detective story but characteristic of Musso’s works, is the demonstrative and striking intertextuality that incorporates literature, cinema, music, and the graphics of modern digital texts into the orbit of the writer’s genotext. Musso’s “cinematic writing” is characterized by one of the canonical techniques of montage, the constant shifting of the “camera” focus and the redirection of the reader’s attention from one episode to another, with episodes unfolding in parallel across different locations and time zones. This is underscored by the complex graphics in the novels’ texts, which aim to create a cinematic frame, as Musso’s works essentially function as ready-made scenario plans for both the director and the cameraman. A distinctive feature of Musso’s novelistic prose is indispensable epigraphs, which start the mechanism of a complex game with the reader, who is forced to constantly maneuver between different senses in order to find the right answer. The frame text, atypical for a detective story and typical for Musso as a component of the genre paradigm of his novels, has important functions in the interactive dialogue of the author with the reader, who through the unraveling of cultural pretexts, through “writing in pictures”, the visualization of electronic forms of modern digital discourse, feels the illusion of complicity in events. “Оther’s text” in Musso’s novels is often represented by archetypes of “soap operas” and classic plots, which have become the part of the stereotypical layer of the collective unconscious of humanity and allow the writer to combine the “expectation horizons” of both elite and mass readers. Intertextuality enables the writer to engage in a “four-handed” interaction with the reader. The principles proposed by the writer destroy the hermeticity of the detective genre construction as one of the most canonical and regular genres, making it impossible to clearly define the genre of Musso’s works. A multi-layered discourse, uncharacteristic of a detective in its various genre modifications, combines different registers and codes from cultural genotexts – literary, advertising, scientific, cinematographic, musical, mass media – maximally expands the reader’s perception, marking the original style of G. Musso’s novels, fantasized in the form of criminal-psychoanalytic suspense. These works reflect processes of intermediality, genre hybridization, and the blurring of boundaries between elite and mass artistic discourse, all hallmarks of postmodernism.

Introduction Crime fiction is one of the world’s most popular genres. Indeed, it has been estimated that as many as one in every three new novels, published in English, is classified within the crime fiction category (Knight xi). These new entrants to the market are forced to jostle for space on bookstore and library shelves with reprints of classic crime novels; such works placed in, often fierce, competition against their contemporaries as well as many of their predecessors. Raymond Chandler, in his well-known essay The Simple Art of Murder, noted Ernest Hemingway’s observation that “the good writer competes only with the dead. The good detective story writer […] competes not only with all the unburied dead but with all the hosts of the living as well” (3). In fact, there are so many examples of crime fiction works that, as early as the 1920s, one of the original ‘Queens of Crime’, Dorothy L. Sayers, complained: It is impossible to keep track of all the detective-stories produced to-day [sic]. Book upon book, magazine upon magazine pour out from the Press, crammed with murders, thefts, arsons, frauds, conspiracies, problems, puzzles, mysteries, thrills, maniacs, crooks, poisoners, forgers, garrotters, police, spies, secret-service men, detectives, until it seems that half the world must be engaged in setting riddles for the other half to solve (95). Twenty years after Sayers wrote on the matter of the vast quantities of crime fiction available, W.H. Auden wrote one of the more famous essays on the genre: The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict. Auden is, perhaps, better known as a poet but his connection to the crime fiction genre is undisputed. As well as his poetic works that reference crime fiction and commentaries on crime fiction, one of Auden’s fellow poets, Cecil Day-Lewis, wrote a series of crime fiction novels under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake: the central protagonist of these novels, Nigel Strangeways, was modelled upon Auden (Scaggs 27). Interestingly, some writers whose names are now synonymous with the genre, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler, established the link between poetry and crime fiction many years before the publication of The Guilty Vicarage. Edmund Wilson suggested that “reading detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking” (395). In the first line of The Guilty Vicarage, Auden supports Wilson’s claim and confesses that: “For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol” (406). This indicates that the genre is at best a trivial pursuit, at worst a pursuit that is bad for your health and is, increasingly, socially unacceptable, while Auden’s ideas around taste—high and low—are made clear when he declares that “detective stories have nothing to do with works of art” (406). The debates that surround genre and taste are many and varied. The mid-1920s was a point in time which had witnessed crime fiction writers produce some of the finest examples of fiction to ever be published and when readers and publishers were watching, with anticipation, as a new generation of crime fiction writers were readying themselves to enter what would become known as the genre’s Golden Age. At this time, R. Austin Freeman wrote that: By the critic and the professedly literary person the detective story is apt to be dismissed contemptuously as outside the pale of literature, to be conceived of as a type of work produced by half-educated and wholly incompetent writers for consumption by office boys, factory girls, and other persons devoid of culture and literary taste (7). This article responds to Auden’s essay and explores how crime fiction appeals to many different tastes: tastes that are acquired, change over time, are embraced, or kept as guilty secrets. In addition, this article will challenge Auden’s very narrow definition of crime fiction and suggest how Auden’s religious imagery, deployed to explain why many people choose to read crime fiction, can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment. This latter argument demonstrates that a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. Crime Fiction: A Type For Every Taste Cathy Cole has observed that “crime novels are housed in their own section in many bookshops, separated from literary novels much as you’d keep a child with measles away from the rest of the class” (116). Times have changed. So too, have our tastes. Crime fiction, once sequestered in corners, now demands vast tracts of prime real estate in bookstores allowing readers to “make their way to the appropriate shelves, and begin to browse […] sorting through a wide variety of very different types of novels” (Malmgren 115). This is a result of the sheer size of the genre, noted above, as well as the genre’s expanding scope. Indeed, those who worked to re-invent crime fiction in the 1800s could not have envisaged the “taxonomic exuberance” (Derrida 206) of the writers who have defined crime fiction sub-genres, as well as how readers would respond by not only wanting to read crime fiction but also wanting to read many different types of crime fiction tailored to their particular tastes. To understand the demand for this diversity, it is important to reflect upon some of the appeal factors of crime fiction for readers. Many rules have been promulgated for the writers of crime fiction to follow. Ronald Knox produced a set of 10 rules in 1928. These included Rule 3 “Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable”, and Rule 10 “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them” (194–6). In the same year, S.S. Van Dine produced another list of 20 rules, which included Rule 3 “There must be no love interest: The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar”, and Rule 7 “There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better” (189–93). Some of these directives have been deliberately ignored or have become out-of-date over time while others continue to be followed in contemporary crime writing practice. In sharp contrast, there are no rules for reading this genre. Individuals are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction. There are, however, different appeal factors for readers. The most common of these appeal factors, often described as doorways, are story, setting, character, and language. As the following passage explains: The story doorway beckons those who enjoy reading to find out what happens next. The setting doorway opens widest for readers who enjoy being immersed in an evocation of place or time. The doorway of character is for readers who enjoy looking at the world through others’ eyes. Readers who most appreciate skilful writing enter through the doorway of language (Wyatt online). These doorways draw readers to the crime fiction genre. There are stories that allow us to easily predict what will come next or make us hold our breath until the very last page, the books that we will cheerfully lend to a family member or a friend and those that we keep close to hand to re-read again and again. There are settings as diverse as country manors, exotic locations, and familiar city streets, places we have been and others that we might want to explore. There are characters such as the accidental sleuth, the hardboiled detective, and the refined police officer, amongst many others, the men and women—complete with idiosyncrasies and flaws—who we have grown to admire and trust. There is also the language that all writers, regardless of genre, depend upon to tell their tales. In crime fiction, even the most basic task of describing where the murder victim was found can range from words that convey the genteel—“The room of the tragedy” (Christie 62)—to the absurd: “There it was, jammed between a pallet load of best export boneless beef and half a tonne of spring lamb” (Maloney 1). These appeal factors indicate why readers might choose crime fiction over another genre, or choose one type of crime fiction over another. Yet such factors fail to explain what crime fiction is or adequately answer why the genre is devoured in such vast quantities. Firstly, crime fiction stories are those in which there is the committing of a crime, or at least the suspicion of a crime (Cole), and the story that unfolds revolves around the efforts of an amateur or professional detective to solve that crime (Scaggs). Secondly, crime fiction offers the reassurance of resolution, a guarantee that from “previous experience and from certain cultural conventions associated with this genre that ultimately the mystery will be fully explained” (Zunshine 122). For Auden, the definition of the crime novel was quite specific, and he argued that referring to the genre by “the vulgar definition, ‘a Whodunit’ is correct” (407). Auden went on to offer a basic formula stating that: “a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies” (407). The idea of a formula is certainly a useful one, particularly when production demands—in terms of both quality and quantity—are so high, because the formula facilitates creators in the “rapid and efficient production of new works” (Cawelti 9). For contemporary crime fiction readers, the doorways to reading, discussed briefly above, have been cast wide open. Stories relying upon the basic crime fiction formula as a foundation can be gothic tales, clue puzzles, forensic procedurals, spy thrillers, hardboiled narratives, or violent crime narratives, amongst many others. The settings can be quiet villages or busy metropolises, landscapes that readers actually inhabit or that provide a form

The article presents an analysis of the popular historical / retro detective genre, considered in terms of semantic fields shared with other literary genres, which for their synthesis. In particular, the motive of the activity of the past in the present and the future, present in almost all literary forms, is of a formative significance in the detective story. The plot is built on a retrospective reconstruction of events leading to a particular situation, typically a crime. This motive is crucial for historical and quasi-historical genres such as alternative history and cryptohistory, in which similar “detective” work on the reproduction of real or hypothetical events, their origins and results is carried out by the author himself and to some extent by the recipient. Such artistic research holds a significant place in the “investigation novel” genre, allowing the author to present his/her own scientifically based version of ambiguous historical material.The motive of understanding the true causes and nature of events is also present in the psychological novel, where the focus is shifted from the “external” mystery of the situation to the secrets of the depths of the human psyche. The fundamental principles of the detective genre reach considerable archetypal depth, based on such mythological and philosophical themes as the essence of time and the cause-and-effect relationships of events, the meaning of being and the essence of repentance. All this creates significant opportunities for philosophy, including historiosophical artistic research, allowing a complex synthesis of genres (most often: detective story – history – science fiction and fantasy), with extensive use of the achievements of psychological and social literature. All these forms of the artistic interpretation of the “past-in-the-future” are very relevant to the culture that is seeking new understanding of its own past and the history of international relations. It explains the relative popularity of the historical and retro-detective in contemporary Ukrainian literature.For Ukrainian authors, the second half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries remains the most attractive period. The strongest points of their novels are a significant amount of historical and local history information, as well as efforts to understand (and rethink) the imperial heritage in its various forms; after all, it is not only about the Russian but also about the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Стаття є частиною дослідження побудови колоніальної стратегії колишнім Радянським Союзом за допомогою ідеологем масової літератури

Russian art, especially of the modern period, has attracted unprecedented academic and commercial attention in recent years, and the number of publications on general themes and particular artists has grown considerably. Even so, the study of Russian art still suffers from its traditional defects: a reluctance on the part of professional art historians to treat the art of barbaric Russia seriously; a disproportionate reliance on commentary by literary critics, sociologists, and journalists; and an all-too-frequent misinterpretation of facts by writers with good intentions but without a knowledge of the Cyrillic alphabet. It is inconceivable that a scholar would undertake research into the art of, say, Picasso, without some degree of competence in French; yet many writers who study the work of Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and Vladimir Tatlin rely exclusively on translated sources. This fact alone indicates the national bias that our art history still supports in its distribution of merits. Despite these conditions, there has been a marked improvement in the state of Russian art history in recent times, especially with regard to the so-called avant-garde, and it seems that Russian art of all periods may finally become a hallowed field of inquiry for the professional art historian. One other relevant circumstance should be mentioned here: until the late 1960's, Western scholars were almost alone in their efforts to propagate the innovative movements of 20th-century Russian art, especially the style moderne and the avant-garde. In their publications and formal debates, our Soviet colleagues tended either to ignore entire periods of their cultural heritage or to misrepresent them as formalist and bourgeois. This position is now changing, a development signaled by the huge Soviet exhibition in Paris in 1979 (Bibliography 41)1 and its Moscow version (39) in 1981 although, as the French organizers learned, there are many sensitive areas in Russian art that are still dismissed as complex and contradictory (a common euphemism for ideologically unpopular subjects in Soviet art-historical scholarship). purpose of this essay, however, is not to examine the vagaries of current Soviet interpretations of art. Although I shall refer to important Soviet publications, the focus here is on recent Western publications (especially Englishlanguage books and catalogues) that have made a significant contribution to our knowledge and understanding of Russian art of the last 100 years, specifically of the historical stages of its development (Realism, the fin-de-sikcle, the avant-garde, Revolutionary art, Socialist Realism). As I cannot treat all relevant titles in an essay of this length, I shall confine my comments largely to publications of the last five years. My omission of detailed references to earlier studies such as the surveys by Tamara Talbot Rice (45), George Heard Hamilton (22), and Camilla Gray (17) should not be construed, therefore, as a mark of disdain. These are still important source books, essential for any student of Russian culture, even though they can and should be supplemented by the new publications. Among books of a general nature, mention should be made of the catalogue of the exhibition Russian and Soviet Painting (49) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1977, and the third volume of the Cambridge Companion to Russian Studies (6), published in 1980. Metropolitan exhibition relied exclusively on pictures from Soviet collections, most of which (altogether, 163 items) are illustrated in the catalogue. Russian and Soviet Painting represented all periods of Russian art, from early icons to contemporary styles, and it included a number of famous pieces, such as Our Lady of the Don (14th century), Vladimir Borovikovsky's Portrait of Catherine the Great Walking in the Park of Tsarskoe Selo (1794), Vereshchagin's Apotheosis of War (1871) and Mikhail Larionov's Cockerel. Rayonist Study (1912). essays in the catalogue, by Dmitrii Sarabianov, Chairman of the Department of Russian History at Moscow State University, and by John E. Bowlt, provide synopses of the evolution of Russian art, especially of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Sarabianov views the development of Russian art as an organic process that has retained its distinctive characteristics despite its debt to Western culture. These are, among others, a vital concern with content rather than with form, an emphasis on didactic value, and the use of bright color for emotional effect. By comparison, the Companion to Russian Studies is a more academic history, concise, factual, and wellorganized. four sections, on The and Architecture of Old Russia, 988-1700 and Art and Architecture in the Petersburg Age, 1700-1860 (both by Robin Milner-Gulland) and Art and Architecture in the Age of Revolution, 1860-1917 and Art and Architecture in Soviet Russia, 1917-1972 (both by John E. Bowlt), provide a reliable, objective basis for further study of specific aspects. One of the main criticisms leveled at most histories of Russian art is that their authors follow a vertical rather than a horizontal approach and treat their subjects as a cultural manifestation independent of, or at least foreign to, Western movements. But in fact, Russian art of the 19th and 20th centuries was closely bound to Europe and, mutatis mutandis, Russian artistic styles have evolved either as delayed imitations or abrupt expansions of European counterparts. Two recent books address the issue of the international context of Russian art: Beitrage zu den europaischen Beziigen der Kunst in Russland (47) and Dmitrii Sarabianov's Russkaia zhivopis XIX veka sredi evropeiskikh shkol [Russian 19th Century Painting and the European Schools] (54). four essays in Beitrdige, by Heinz Ladendorf, Gudrum Calov, and Alexander Miiller, provide a new and refreshing interpretation of the history of Russian art as it developed inside Russia under the influence of imported German artists and in the colonies of Russian artists in Italy and Germany. activities of Russian artists in Munich in the 1890's and early 1900's have been documented in a number of publications, but this book reminds us that other German towns also attracted Russian artists in the 19th century, particularly Diisseldorf, Dresden, and Berlin. Of interest are the sections on Aleksandr Ivanov and Orest Kiprensky in Rome, Ivan Shishkin in Dresden, and on Ernst Barlach, Heinrich Vogeler, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff in Russia in the early 20th century. Sarabianov's comparative investigation is the more ambitious and provocative because he not only presents important factual data on the European travels of certain 19th-century Russian artists, but also regards them, in many cases, as counterparts worthy of or finer than their Western colleagues. He notes iconographic parallels between artists such as Kiprensky and Gros, Venetsianov and Waldmiiller, Ivanov and Schnorr von Carolsfeld, K. Korovin and Pissarro, and Vrubel and Klinger. While some of the analyses seem precipitate, others demonstrate that, far from being isolated, Russian artists of the 19th century

REVIEWS625 Disorderly discourse: Narrative, conflict, and inequality. Ed. by Charles L. Briggs. (Oxford studies in anthropological linguistics, 7). New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. ii, 248. $49.95. Reviewed by James Stanlaw, Illinois State University Most anthropologists and linguists would agree that narratives are critical devices that can be used to establish social organization, convey values, reify power structures, and solve disputes. Few would also deny that conflict, on any number of levels, is part of our daily lives. But as Charles Briggs, the editor of this volume, says, conflict and narrative have usually been treated in relative isolation (3). This collection of essays—which grew out of a special session of the American Ethnological Association meetings in 1988—is an attempt to examine them together linguistically in an ethnographic context. In a long introduction, B sets a theoretical grounding for how narrative might sustain, create, and mediate conflict. In essence, this is a review essay of about 175 sources examining most of the critical literature through about 1994. But more than that, B, in lucid detail, discusses how ideology articulates with hegemony, how power meets with resistance, as well as how symbols, icons, and indexes operate in discourse and metadiscursive practices. The logic behind why the following eight papers are presented is clearly stated. The book's first chapter is Donald Brenneis's discussion of conflict resolution using talanoa 'gossip' and pancayat 'mediation' in an East Indian community in the Fiji Islands. The former is raucous, quick, and entertaining while the later is staid, formal, and deliberate. Gossip holds people together through a kind of friendship diat is often difficult to achieve in this 'perilously flexible social world' (47) while formal mediation sessions reinforce the egalitarian sense of community where everyone has the right to have their say. Besides helping to resolve specific disputes, these two narrative devices extol culturally salient models of discourse and behavior. In the second article, Ellen Basso examines Taugi, me trickster figure of me Kalapalo of central Brazil. Tricksters—who are both mythological culture heroes and clowns who violate the most sacred of social taboos—are found throughout the world's societies, particularly in indigenous America. They have long been objects of fascination for anthropologists and psychoanalysts alike. By considering tricksters as 'narrativized selves' (54) we can see how Taugi creates his ambiguous persona through his self-referential discourse (by such means as not using evidential particles in his speech). In the book's third chapter, Michael Herzfeld discusses the creation of 'honor among thieves' in a society of sheep-poachers. He explores a number of narrative and linguistic devices some highland villagers in Crete use to suggest that they have no choice but to resort to thievery, even though they may be quite cognizant of the legal and moral sanctions they have violated. This moral ambiguity is compounded when two moral codes—that of the village and that of the nation-state (which share a partially common rhetoric)—can be played off one another. The fourth entry takes us to that most exotic of field sites, the American dinner table. In this article, Elinor Ochs, Ruth Smith, and Carolyn Taylor describe the kind of talk that often occurs between parents and children over the evening meal as the events of the day are related to other family members. One particular form of discourse—what the authors call 'detective stories'—is seen as being 'co-narrated' by both speaker and listeners. A detective story here is one where some participants feel there is missing information critical to the plot or the motivation of the characters. In Lieutenant Columbo-like fashion, an interrogator may persist in seeking information beyond the initial version of the story, which (at least in some sense) could be considered already complete. For instance, in one example given, a young girl describes her incredulity at a classmate only getting a detention for an infraction (lifting up her dress in front of the boys) that she felt should have merited at least a suspension. However, on closer questioning by her brother, it turns out the girl has also had a detention in the past—a fact that for obvious reasons...

This volume assembles the work of leading international scholars in a comprehensive history of Russian literary theory and criticism from 1917 to the post-Soviet age. By examining the dynamics of literary criticism and theory in three arenas--political, intellectual, and institutional--the authors capture the progression and structure of Russian literary criticism and its changing function and discourse. The chapters follow early movements such as formalism, the Bakhtin Circle, Proletklut, futurism, the fellow-travellers, and the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. By the cultural revolution of 1928, literary criticism became a mechanism of Soviet policies, synchronous with official ideology. The chapters follow theory and criticism into the 1930s with examinations of the Union of Soviet Writers, semantic palaeontology, and socialist realism under Stalin. A more humanised literary criticism appeared during the ravaging years of World War II, only to be supplanted by a return to the party line, Soviet heroism, and anti-Semitism in the late Stalinist period. During Khrushchev's Thaw, there was a remarkable rise in liberal literature and criticism, that was later refuted in the nationalist movement of the long 1970s. The same decade saw, on the other hand, the rise to prominence of semiotics and structuralism. Postmodernism and a strong revival of academic literary studies have shared the stage since the start of the post-Soviet era. For the first time anywhere, this collection analyses all of the important theorists and major critical movements during a tumultuous ideological period in Russian history, including developments in emigre literary theory and criticism.

Detective stories and novels draw the attention of a wide array of readers. These were mouth- watering prospects whenever being catered to its readers and audiences over the decades. However, if we could go back through the time machine, we would see that late 18th and later half of 19th century developed the foundation of such kind of fictions and not to mention, afterward, detective fictions progressed leaps and bounds, as it rampaged its authority on the English literature. Although such stories are considered as potential crowd pullers but above all, if we intricate such stories and novels in depth, we would be able to see a sizeable reflection of 19th century Victorian Age and its social perspectives. Therefore, in this essay, we would like to emphasize primarily to illustrate the socio-economy of Victorian Era, in relevance to the contribution of detective fiction stories and novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Article visualizations:

Unzuverlässiges Erzählen als werkübergreifende Kategorie. Personale und impersonale Erzählinstanzen im phantastischen Kriminalroman

Ukraine's Quest for Identity: Embracing Cultural Hybridity in Literary Imagination, 1911–2011

Poe in Cyberspace: The Pleasure Principle Revisited

Traditionally, the history of detective stories as a literary genre begins in the 19th century with the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Emile Gaboriau and a handful of other writers. The 19th century was actually awash in detective stories, though many, like the so-called detective notebooks, are so rare that they lay beyond the reach of even the most dedicated readers. This volume surveys the first 50 years of the detective story in 19th century America and England, examining not only major works, but also the lesser known--including contemporary pseudo-biographies, magazines, story papers, and newspapers--only recently accessible through new media. By rewriting the history of the mystery genre, this study opens up new avenues for literary exploration.