“A casa torta” e a formação pedagógica: deslizando os sentidos da infância

Este trabalho toma a obra "A Casa Torta" como ponto de injunção de três planos discursivos entorno da representação da infância. 1º, da autora, Agatha Christie, circunscrita pelas regras que regem o romance policial enquanto gênero literário. 2º, da narrativa, a criança Josephine, elevada ao estatuto de personagem conceitual, e, 3º, da experiência da leitura desse livro como possibilidade para o processo de formação em pedagogia. Propõe-se a articulação desses planos como forma de contraposição aos discursos homogeneizadores entorno da infância, como efeito de deslocamentos na produção dos sentidos. Apoiados pela Análise de Discurso Francesa, que assinala os limites das interpretações como o próprio lugar do trabalho do analista, destacamos a potência da representação da criança torta quando desconectada do erro ou do patológico, e atrelada à presença de um hiato que nos desafia a preencher com a precariedade da palavra. Nesse mesmo processo, a criança torta na educação é aquela que resiste tanto às rotinas escolares, quanto à aprendizagem, colocando-se em posição deslocada e dando a ver o processo de produção de sentidos em suas formas históricas.

O design emocional aplicado ao projeto gráfico de livros: projetando uma coleção de Agatha Christie

Este artigo apresenta os resultados de um estudo que explorou, por meio de revisão bibliográfica, as relações entre o design editorial de coleções e o design emocional. Esta foi a base teórica que substanciou a proposta do projeto gráfico de uma coleção de livros com obras selecionadas da autora Agatha Christie. A pesquisa foi complementada com a realização de um levantamento parcial das coleções de livros da autora anteriormente publicadas no Brasil e no exterior, com amostra definida por acessibilidade.

The Comfort of Crime: The Appeal of Formulaic Fiction during the Pandemic

2020 was taxing, and one of the comforting ways of dealing with the uncertainty the COVID-19 pandemic has brought was reading. It seems hardly surprising that the British turned to crime fiction, which they not only avidly consume but also successfully produce. Moreover, 2020 marked the centenary of the publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, a novel that introduced Agatha Christie and her first detective, Hercule Poirot. The anniversary partly accounts for the resurgence of interest in classic detective fiction. Over the last one hundred years the genre has undergone various developments and diversifications, but this article offers a look back at its past. Acknowledging Jesper Gulddal and Stewart King’s objections to defining crime fiction as formulaic (2020), it draws on John G. Cawelti’s classic work on the mystery and detective story formulas (1976) to addresses the popularity of crime fiction during the pandemic. It contends that while the immense appeal of the crime genre stems from its adaptability, it is the oft-criticised basic mystery formula that offers the greatest comfort during such challenging times.

Feminization of Agatha Christie´s Character Hercule Poirot through His Appearance, Personality, Age and Cat Symbolism

This article aims to analyze how Agatha Christie’s character Hercule Poirot is feminized through several aspects, namely his appearance and character, his age and recurring cat symbolism. All the aspects and their examples were collected from Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot stories employing close reading as a method. By the use of several academic papers focused mainly on the topic of gender stereotypes in connection to the presented examples from Agatha Christie’s works, the central argument is that the character of the male detective Hercule Poirot is strongly feminized. Although this theory is already widely accepted, this article focuses on its less frequently discussed aspects, namely cat symbolism and age-related feminization.

From Hamlet to Holmes: literary detective tradition

Exposed to the mystery of his father’s suspicious death, young Hamlet followed the riddle of solving it in the longest tragedy of Shakespeare. By suspension and the lengthy nature of detective works, Shakespeare seems to have initiated a new subgenre in drama which may have later on been converted into an independent subgenre in the novel by Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie through their imaginative characters, Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes and the pair of Hercules Poirot with Miss Marple respectively. Fyodor Dostoevsky may have also spread the net of Hamletian subtext in his Crime and Punishment. Plotting a perfect crime by the murderers and the public approval of the plan, on one hand, and the inconvincible mind of the hero which ultimately undo the seemingly unsolvable puzzle, on the other, construct the very core of all aforementioned works of Shakespeare, Poe, and Doyle. The unanticipated and unpredicted findings of either Holmes or Hamlet defeat the expectations of the audience and bring the runaway justice back to her groom.

Reproduction of encrypted messages in fiction from English into Russian

This article examines cases where translators are confronted with messagesm whose meaning is obscured by a simple cipher. Russian translators had to overcome certain difficulties while translating certain passages in the works of British (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie) and American (Edgar Allan Poe, Dan Brown) fiction writers. Substitution code (―The Gold-Bug‖, ―The Adventure of the Dancing Men‖), anagrams (―The da Vinci Code‖), as well as different kinds of text steganography (―The Gloria Scott‖, ―The Four Suspects‖) can be used to encrypt the information. Each case is illustrated with two examples. The translator has to depict not only the very process of deciphering a message, but also render its cryptic nature with the means of a target language (Russian). We show, that in half of the cases it is a mere translation of the deciphered text. It is a simpler way, because there is no need to create an analogue thereof. The grand purpose, however, remains unachieved. In two instances there were multiple translations of the same text (6 of ―The Gold-Bug‖ by E.A Poe and 9 of ―The Four Suspects‖ by A. Christie). This phenomenon can be explained not only by the popularity of the stories, but by the relatively small circulation of certain editions. We have undertaken a comparative analysis of these translations and have revealed discrepancies, concerning more and less significant translation units and, in some cases minor errors.

Agatha Christie’s Poirot novels as fairy tales: Two case studies

The popularity of detective stories may result from the attraction of the hero, the entertaining thrill of the plot or the comforting power of the overall message which promises that evil will be defeated in the end: there is always someone able to fight it and determined to do so. But the immense success of detective stories can also be explained otherwise, which is the purpose of this article. In this research, Vladimir Propp’s narratemes – understood as recurring, genre-specific structure elements of the plot – are evidenced in two successful detective novels by Agatha Christie. The nature of detective novels in general and the uniqueness of the detective Poirot as a character are outlined, followed by the presentation of Propp’s narratemes. Then, the contents of two selected works by Christie, The mysterious affair at Styles and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, are scrutinised and retold in terms of the narratemes identified in them. It is thereby claimed and confirmed through selected examples that the detective novels examined draw on a modified morphology typical of fairy tales, as is described by Propp. Consequently, further research is postulated to verify the hypothesis of similarities between detective novels and fairy tales as a factor contributing to the tremendous success of the former as a genre.

The Salt of the Earth or the Murderess? The Problem of Femininity in the Novels of Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie’s outlook on gender, as depicted in her novels, has been described as conservative or even criticised as anti-feminist. However, more recently, a growing number of feminist scholars (Alison Light, Susan Rowland, Merja Makinen) have begun to oppose this view and instead argue that Christie’s approach to the various social phenomena depicted in her novels, including gender, is more nuanced and ambiguous than previously assumed. This paper explores the role of domesticity in general, and of food, eating and cooking in particular, in constructing such ambiguous portrayal of femininity in three of Agatha Christie’s detective novels: Cards on the Table (1936), The Hollow (1946), and 4.50 from Paddington (1957). The novels depict three groups of female characters possessing varying degrees of power and independence: the salt of the earth, i.e., the conservative homemaker, the eccentric, and the murderess. It is the aim of this paper to demonstrate that, paradoxically, it is o en through these female characters’ roles within the domestic setting and their engagement with food that they are able to overcome the limitations imposed on them by patriarchal society and achieve a certain level of autonomy within it.

O Gerente e a Recepcionista

Publicado em 1965, O Caso do Hotel Bertram reúne algumas das caracterizações mais importantes, dentre os romances protagonizados por Miss Jane Marple. Neste ensaio, discutem-se os métodos empregados por Agatha Christie ao representar as diferentes classes sociais das personagens no romance, com ênfase nos retratos do gerente e da recepcionista do estabelecimento em que os crimes acontecem.