Professor Jesper Gulddal

Appointment with Death (1938) poses a challenge to the longstanding critical practice of highlighting Agatha Christie's lack of literary sophistication: her 'workmanlike' style, stereotypical settings, two-dimensional characters and ludic conception of the plot as a game that the author plays with the reader. This challenge is due not only to the Middle Eastern setting or the novel's detailed psychoanalytical reading of domestic abuse, but also, more importantly, to its textual and subtextual debates surrounding truth and justice and the articulation of both through narrative. Based on a detailed textual examination of the novel, drawing in part on Pierre Bayard's 'counterinvestigative' approach to detective fiction, I argue that Appointment with Death presents readers with two competing narratives: Poirot's standard narrative of criminal retribution and a mythical narrative that links the suppression of pre-civilisational savagery to the practice of human sacrifice. As suggested by way of conclusion, this dual narrative structure must be seen as an effect of place, specifically the relocation of an English murder mystery to a Middle Eastern rife with cultural and mythical meanings.

Pierre Bayard is a polarizing figure in contemporary French criticism: on the one hand, he is brilliant, innovative, and daring; on the other hand, he seems to delight in deception and sleight of hand, particularly in the way that he revisits, and arguably transvalorizes, theoretical discourse reminiscent, inter alia, of poststructuralism and deconstruction. In this article, we wish to reveal the double-sidedness of Bayard's new detective criticism in order to see how his new solutions to classic crime texts carry within themselves clues to their own undoing as well as alternative solutions that can be deemed to have been sown consciously or unconsciously into the weave of Bayard's analysis. This is the irony of Bayard's criticism: it references the work by reverting to a study of the text while keeping both, work and text, in view and, effectively, by being both, that is, by exposing the textuality of canonical literary works and presenting his criticism as transparently readable, even as "easy reading," he offers his ideas as works, which the reader can read as such but can also reread, à la Pierre Bayard, as text.

The argument presented in this article addresses a conflict that is fundamental to the eighteenth-century transformation of the novel namely that between the mobility restrictions imposed by the modern state and the novel's traditional dependency on the free mobility of its characters. J. G. Schnabel's Insel Felsenburg is a striking literary manifestation of this conflict. As I argue, the narrative logic of this voluminous and somewhat bizarre novel can only be fully appreciated when taking into account its complex negotiations of mobility and movement control. Marking the confluence of two novelistic traditions, the utopian novel and the adventure novel, it is equally reliant on the settledness and the nomadism of its central characters, the former being the precondition for social order, the latter the basis for the novel's narrative momentum. The structure of the novel results from an attempt to resolve this conflict by channelling mobility into politically and morally acceptable paths ¿ that is, by inventing a literary movement control regime.

A striking yet overlooked feature of Stendhal's La Chartreuse de Parme (1839) is the prominence that this novel accords to passports and movement control practices. This feature is a product of the novel's historical surroundings. During the post-Napoleonic Restoration, the passport had become a favoured instrument of power for absolutist governments across Europe, and the Austrian Empire in particular had set up a notoriously restrictive passport system, extending also to the Austrian possessions and client states in Northern Italy - the scene of Stendhal's narrative. Tracing the numerous references to the Austrian movement control regime, this article argues that the passport motif should be seen, not simply as a "reality effect" or a metaphor for identity conflicts, but as an interface linking a specific political practice and a specific literary form. Thus, the novel provides ample historically accurate information about the contemporary passport system, yet at the same time uses this information as a structuring device that crucially informs the articulation of its space, plot, and major themes. By virtue of this structural centrality, the passport motif opens up a new political dimension in a novel that has often been seen simply as an escapist fantasy.

In this article, three recent works by French, English and German authors are analysed as examples of anti-Americanism in contemporary European literature. Luc Lang's travel book, 11 septembre mon amour (2003), John Le Carré's spy novel, Absolute friends (2003) and Frank Schätzing's apocalyptic 'eco-thriller' Der Schwarm (2004) were all written in response to the ongoing 'war on terror', and each presents a remarkably antagonistic interpretation of the United States and its role in the world today. Although the literary strategies employed in these negative representations of the US are very different in each case, the three books share a deep disgust not only with American foreign policy, invariably interpreted as a reckless, deranged bid for global hegemony, but also with American culture and society in general. This article interprets this disgust as an expression of a deep-seated, irrational Americanophobia¿that is, of 'anti-Americanism'. © 2007, Centre of International Studies.