Ex Uno Plures: Global French in, on and of the Rue Morgue and the Orient Express
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Alistair Rolls
Abstract
In the following paper, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express are considered, and compared, as exemplars of what Andrea Goulet has labelled “Global French,” which is to say that both texts convey non-English, and especially French, language use through their own original English. Both texts will be shown to be born in, stage, and depart from primal linguistic scenes: the Babelian confusion of Poe’s multiple foreign witnesses will be embodied in the impediments that keep them from the scene of the crime; in Christie’s case, the multilingual investigation on board the Orient Express will stand in place of stilted and curtailed conversation held, in the Global French of Christie’s English, on the platform of another train. As sites of original translation and communicative excess and failure, these classic texts are about language first and crime second; indeed, the murder on Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express embodies taking place but, ultimately, does not take place at all.
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© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
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- „Stierkampf in Bayonne“ – Corrida in Lissabon
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Contributions
- Intermediales Ensemble der „Narrenburg“: Stifters Solitär in vergleichender Methode
- „Stierkampf in Bayonne“ – Corrida in Lissabon
- Ex Uno Plures: Global French in, on and of the Rue Morgue and the Orient Express
- Warum „ekelhaftestes Film-Machwerk“?
- Shane and the Language of Men
- Mimetic Desire and the Complication of the Conventional Neo-Slave Narrative Form in Edward P. Jones’s The Known World
- Fantasy and its Suspension in an Age of Awkwardness: Timur Vermes’s Look Who’s Back
- Reviews
- Natalia Igl and Julia Menzel, eds.: Illustrierte Zeitschriften um 1900. Mediale Eigenlogik, Multimodalität und Metaisierung. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2016 (Edition Medienwissenschaft). 420 pp.
- Stefanie Retzlaff: Observieren und Aufschreiben. Zur Poetologie medizinischer Fallgeschichten (1700–1765). Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2018. 231 S.
- Katharina Döderlein: Die Diskrepanz zwischen Recht und Rechtsgefühl in der Literatur: ein Dramatischer Dualismus von Heinrich von Kleist bis Martin Walser. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2017. 339 pp.
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- Giorgio Agamben: Creazione e anarchia. L’opera nell’età della religione capitalista. Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2017. 139 pp.
- Marcel Broodthaers ein Maler? Über die Sonderstellung eines Mediums unter post-medialen Bedingungen
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- Michael Schmitz, Hg.: Literatur und Politik. Zwischen Engagement und „Neuer Subjektivität“. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2017. 150 S.
- Review: Reihe Wieder gelesen
- Die Ko-Präsenz der Igel. Vom unendlichen Gespräch zum Literarisch-Absoluten, billet aller-retour
- Retraction
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