- Title
- From wolf to wolf-man: foreignness and self-alterity in Fred Vargas's L'Homme à l'envers
- Creator
- Rolls, Alistair
- Relation
- The Foreign in International Crime Fiction: Transcultural Representations p. 112-123
- Relation
- http://www.bloomsbury.com/au/the-foreign-in-international-crime-fiction-9781441128171/
- Publisher
- Continuum
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2012
- Description
- This study will combine a number of approaches to read the ways in which foreignness characterizes Fred Vargas's self-styled rompols (from roman policier, or crime novel). By mapping the plotline of L'Homme à l'envers (1999)[Seeking Whom He May Devour, (2006)] onto Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), I will show that in both works a metropolitan (outsider) detective investigates a murder by a large canid in the depths of the countryside. Then, in line with Pierre Bayard's famous rewriting of Conan Doyle's novel, the innocence of the convicted party will be shown to be the other side of guilt, a foreignness that lurks within but which careful reading can bring to the surface. I will also argue that, along with deconstructive and Freudian readins, the modernist figure of the Baudelairean flâneur highlights the Otherness of the investigation. By questioning the guilt of Vargas's other Other, I will take self-alterity to its logical (and logically nihilistic) end-point, opening up possibilities, here both criminal and textual, and reconsidering the culpability of the supposed murderer.
- Subject
- foreignness; self-alterity; crime fiction
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1309354
- Identifier
- uon:21848
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781441128171
- Language
- eng
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