Dr Reshmi Dutta-Flanders, Assistant Lecturer in the Department of English Language & Linguistics, will be speaking at the ‘Captivating Criminality’ conference to be held at Bath Spa University on 24 April.
Reshmi’s talk is entitled ‘Crime a Layered Discourse: Agatha Christie’ and will consider the phenomenon of ‘layering’. The details pertaining to truth and fiction can be layered in perspective of the observer or narrator, based on non-material things like feelings, thoughts and motives.
Layering is also presented in the chronology of narrated events as a form of anticipation or retrospection, flashbacks (anaphora) or flashforwards (cataphora). These approaches are characteristically realised in syntactical elements and in the information centring on a specific object.
Flashback reference serves as a means to focus on or draw attention to someone specific or participants within a group. According to Catherine Emmott, anaphoric reference does not only refer back to the information given before the pronoun, but also takes into account noun phrase and the information from its surrounding text.
As a forward-oriented anaphoric reference, such layering is based on anticipation in the readers. In her talk, Reshmi investigates this further to see how events as also provide contextual monitoring of suspense in plot-based detective stories. She uses a number of texts, including a number of detective stories from Agatha Christie.
For full details of the conference, please see Bath Spa’s page here:
http://captivatingcriminality.bathspa.ac.uk