【12月27日】
/海外名家系列讲座·第100讲/
Miss Marple, Ethical Identity, and Moral Inconsistency in Agatha Christie’s Nemesis (1971)
主讲人：Sandro Jung
时间：12月27日（周三）15:00-16:30
地点： 松江校区五教楼5361
讲座简介
At the start of Agatha Christie 1971 detective novel, Nemesis, Miss Marple, having just learnt of an acquaintance’s death, wonders whether she is “ruthless” in her pursuit of truth and whether, by extension, her “flair” for crime has compromised her integrity. The latter point is not explicitly stated but is invoked throughout the narrative, as part of which she follows this late acquaintance’s request to unravel a mystery in the cause of justice. Mr Rafiel, the deceased, was introduced to Miss Marple in Christie’s A Caribbean Mystery (1964) in which they become allies, solving one murder and preventing another. This presentation will examine what Miss Marple identifies as “ruthlessness” in terms of how she constructs an ethical identity. For in the service of justice, she employs deceit frequently. This deliberate strategy of not telling the truth to pursue the ultimate goal – unravelling crime – is, however, questionable in an ethical system that Miss Marple wants readers to recognize as a conservative, Victorian one. This ethical reading of Christie’s two novels will problematize the dilemma of Miss Marple’s identity construction as a detective. It will make sense of how Christie’s version of her as an “old pussy” contrasts with how she pursues single-mindedly, often adopting questionable ethical strategies, a mode of investigation that stops at nothing to bring criminals to justice.
主讲人简介
Sandro Jung is Grade II Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Fudan University. He is also Jack Ma Distinguished Professor at Hangzhou Normal University and Distinguished Professor at Hexi University. A Past President of the East-Central American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, a former Senior Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the recipient of two European Union Marie Curie long-term fellowships, Jung has been the Editor-in-Chief of the quarterly A&HCI journal, ANQ (Routledge / Taylor & Francis) for the past 11 years. He, furthermore, serves as General Editor of the Lehigh University Press book series, Studies in Text and Print Culture. His main areas of scholarly interest are the literature, culture, and media of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, book and reception history, translation studies, and visual culture (and especially illustration) studies. He has produced more than 200 publications, including more than 130 A&HCI articles. He is the author, among other monographs, of David Mallet, Anglo-Scot: Poetry, Politics, and Patronage in the Age of Union (2008), The Fragmentary Poetic: Eighteenth-Century Uses of an Experimental Mode (2009), James Thomson’s The Seasons, Print Culture, and Visual Interpretation, 1730-1842 (2015), The Publishing and Marketing of Illustrated Literature in Scotland, 1760-1825 (2017), Kleine artige Kupfer: Buchillustration im 18. Jahrhundert (2018), and Eighteenth-Century Illustration, and Literary Material Culture (2023).
