Alistair Rolls
Biographic Data
| ID | 759623 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alistair Rolls |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alistair |
| FAMILY NAME | Rolls |
| SIGNATURE | ROLLS A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Newcastle Australia |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2547-0618 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 5 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Editors’ Preface
[No abstract]
Habeas Corpus
Carter Brown has an important place in Australian and in French studies. On the one hand, he has become famous for not being famous; indeed, introducing him as the most prolific Australian author that most Australians have never heard of has become something of a cliché. On the other, it is Carter Brown, and not Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, nor even Peter Cheyney or James Hadley Chase, who, in sheer volume, dominates the catalogue of tha…
The paradoxes of Roland Barthes's fait-divers murders and Edgar Allan Poe's 'Things external to the game
Characters in works of detective fiction often declare that the events in which they are caught up are more like detective fiction than reality. As a result, detective fiction is tensely present and absent in itself. In other words, this genre whose meaning corresponds so exactly with its detective solution is simultaneously one that strains against the textual parameters of that same solution. This paradox is here mapped onto Roland Barthes's de…
Baudelaire’s Paris Looking at Africa, and Vice Versa
This article tests the textual differences between those of Baudelaire's poems that are typically considered ‘Parisian' or ‘foreign'. It argues that ‘La Belle Dorothée' is not only a poem about an African gaze on France, or indeed only a poem set in Africa, but that it can also be shown to represent an allegory for a Parisian view of self. The more overtly Parisian ‘À une passante’, for its part, glances at more than a poet struck down in Paris b…
Vanilla Twist Again
In the companion piece to this article, the authors discuss John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) from the perspective of what they have dubbed “representational equilibrium,” in which two opposed notions—change over time and absence of transformation—can be shown to pertain at the same time in the same film. This article maps the and-or dynamics of equilibrium onto textual space as something simultaneously autonomous (closed in upon its…
Vanilla and/or Vanilla Twist
This article explores the nature of political representation in John Carpenter’s 1976 film Assault on Precinct 13. Previous scholars have taken divergent views of the representation, particularly racial representation, in this film, suggesting it is variously apolitical, conservative, or liberal. This article uses the lens of a “representational equilibrium” to explore the ways in which meaning is constructed in this film and, moreover, the ways …
Georges Cuvier’s Autopsy Report on Sara Baartman
In the historical research on Sara Baartman, best known as the “Hottentot Venus,” references to and discussions of her autopsy report by Georges Cuvier have been based on the original French text, “Extrait d’observations faites sur le cadavre d’une femme connue à Paris et à Londres sous le nom de Vénus Hottentotte,” published in 1817. For scholars, students and the general public interested in the life of Baartman, an English translation of the a…
Elles se rendent pas compte intertextuel et paratextuel
L’oeuvre de Boris Vian a souvent été caractérisé comme dépendant fortement de son paratexte, qu’il s’agisse de la transformation de figures emblématiques du cercle germanopratin d’après-guerre en véritables personnages romanesques, de l’Affaire Vernon Sullivan, ou bien encore de la présence plus grande que nature de l’homme Vian, dans ses rôles multiples, derrière le texte. De même, l’oeuvre de Vian est aussi intrinsèquement référentiel, émaillé …
Primates in Paris and Edgar Allan Poe’s Paradoxical Commitment to Foreign Languages
Drawing on recent innovations in detective criticism in France, this article broadens the quest to exonerate Poe’s famous orang-utan and argues that the Urtext of modern Anglo-American crime fiction is simultaneously a rejection of linguistic dominance (of English in this case) and an apologia for modern languages. This promotion of linguistic diversity goes hand in hand with the wilful non-self-coincidence of Poe’s detection narrative, which rec…
The Reflexive Carter Brown, or the Prescience of *Last Note for a Lovely
Despite Carter Brownâ s status as the least known of Australiaâ s most successful authors, research has been done on his productions, his style, and his bibliography. This work, by its very nature, often precludes close reading of a traditional kind. A certain amount is known for example, of the purchase of the international rights to the Carter Brown mystery series by American publisher Signet in 1958, but no work has been done on the effects th…
Homogenizing the Radical, or Vice Versa? Adapting (to) The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
This article explores the 2000 telemovie adaptation of Agatha Christie’s classic crime novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) to look at ideas of the need (or not) to be faithful to an original text. The authors unpack some of the issues that surround the often controversial notion of the “canon” in detective fiction and present the telemovie as an example of the text’s critical difference
Saving Paris from Nostalgia
This article pays tribute to Brian Nelson’s understanding of translation as literary analysis. The source texts that it engages with are Baudelaire’s poems, which Clive Scott admits to hearing everywhere. In order to save Baudelaire’s Paris from nostalgia, I translate Ross Chambers’s notion of the “urban jumble” far from its urban home and hear, or rather see, it in the English countryside of Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz (2007). And the key ungrammati…
Pratiques Scandaleuses
The Série Noire was born out of literary scandals (Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Kathleen Winsor's Forever Amber) and traded on them. Marcel Duhamel's mission statement of 1948 promised readers violence and depravity. Its early focus on translations of so-called American thrillers also led to scandalous cases of French authors masquerading as Americans (Boris Vian's role in the Vernon Sullivan affair shocked Paris in 1946 and shone light on…
On Moving and (Inter) Disciplinarity
Our aim in this introduction is to position all the articles that comprise this special issue of the Australian Journal of French Studies within a framework of mobility while highlighting how they each, individually, test and move (beyond) certain frames. We are also writing in response to the annual conference of the Australian\nSociety for French Studies, which we co-convened in 2015 and at which the articles included here were presented. As we…
Vernon Sullivan’s alter ego interpretation
This article takes as its point of departure a number of commonly assumed ideas, or idées reçues, that have, in combination, condemned Vernon Sullivan’s novel J’irai cracher sur vos tombes to the role of crime fiction parody. In order to dispel such myths as the Série Noire’s unproblematic use of translation to usher American crime novels into a France craving Americana after the end of the Second World War, this article analyses Sullivan’s novel…
Pierre Bayard and the Ironies of Detective Criticism
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 critici…
Serializing Sullivan
In 2010, 51 years after his death in 1959, Boris Vian entered the canon of French literary immortals: he was published in Gallimard’s prestigious Bibliothèque de la Pléiade collection. Arguably, however, these are the complete fictional works of two authors: French writer Boris Vian and his black American pseudonymous creation, Vernon Sullivan. For critics like Edmund Smyth this must have represented long overdue recognition of the qualities of t…
Mobile Criticism
Idiosyncratic to the core, French literary critic Pierre Bayard is a divisive figure commonly dismissed as lightweight or as a subverter of academic standards. In this article, we present an alternative view, arguing that Bayard's recent works constitute a systematic attempt to dismantle the dominant "textualist" paradigm of literary studies. We pursue this project across three clusters of experimentation in Bayard's critical writings, each of wh…
An Ankle Queerly turned, or the fetishised bodies in Agatha Christie'sThe Body in the Library
This article takes as its point of departure a fetishistic scene from the 2004 ITV television adaptation of Agatha Christie's The Body in the Library in order to demonstrate (1) how fetishism itself is a form of adaptation and thus how adaptation functions fetishistically; (2) how the fetishism diaplayed in the 2004 adaptation of the The Body in the Library reflexively references a more primal fetishism at work in the ‘original’ text; and (3) how…
Ridges on the floors of Hell»
The Dead Heart is American author Douglas Kennedy’s first novel. It was first translated into French in 1997 as Cul-de-sac . It was this translation that made Kennedy a household name in France and that gave The Dead Heart its identity as a roman noir. In the space of just 20 years the novel has been translated twice into French and adapted twice more, as a film and now as a graphic novel. Elsewhere, we have analyzed this trajectory from the pers…
The Larrikin as Hero (in French Studies)
In this article, we set out to contextualise and analyse the current situation of French Studies in Australia through a brief consideration of both the history of the Australian Journal of French Studies, the discipline itself in the Australian context, and the research context within which that discipline currently finds itself. We suggest that whilst the qualifier "Australian" in the title of AJFS is, in important respects, not at all important…
Traduit de l'américain’ from Poe to the Série Noire
This article reviews the new light shed in 1952 on Charles Baudelaire's translation and critical analysis of Edgar Allan Poe by W.T. Bandy, which exposed the French poet's plagiarism of American sources. Our aim here is to suggest that Baudelaire's Poe project, with its wilful problematisation of originality and translation, author and translator, preempts Marcel Duhamel's own translation project of 1945, the Série Noire. We compare these two Par…
The Practices of Translation
As commentators such as Brian Nelson have argued, literary translation is “a distinctive form of creative writing” that constitutes a “performance” of the source text. The fact that there can exist different translations of a given literary work, for example, is proof enough of the creative role played by the translator. It demonstrates that the translator has choices – choices that are far from trivial, especially when it comes to dealing with w…
Intertextuality as Translatability
In this article, a text, in this case an Australian crime novel, is analyzed in terms of its translatability. The framework adopted here is influenced by deconstructionism, and especially intertextuality, and as such translatability is taken as an inherent tendency of a text to extend beyond its own formal limits and to map itself onto a virtual, foreign version of itself. This mechanics will be shown to be reflected in the structure of Barry Mai…
Larry Schehr
Throwing Caution to the French Wind
Mobile Criticism
Idiosyncratic to the core, French literary critic Pierre Bayard is a divisive figure commonly dismissed as lightweight or as a subverter of academic standards. In this article, we present an alternative view, arguing that Bayard's recent works constitute a systematic attempt to dismantle the dominant "textualist" paradigm of literary studies. We pursue this project across three clusters of experimentation in Bayard's critical writings, each of wh…
Traduit de l'américain’ from Poe to the Série Noire
This article reviews the new light shed in 1952 on Charles Baudelaire's translation and critical analysis of Edgar Allan Poe by W.T. Bandy, which exposed the French poet's plagiarism of American sources. Our aim here is to suggest that Baudelaire's Poe project, with its wilful problematisation of originality and translation, author and translator, preempts Marcel Duhamel's own translation project of 1945, the Série Noire. We compare these two Par…
L'ÉLÉGante De La Rue Lepic
Boris Vian's L'Arrache-cœur
In Olden Days a Glimpse of Stocking
This article analyses an instance of leg fetishism in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947). The aim is to show how the protagonist’s fixation on a pair of nylon stockings can be read as a negotiation of the problems of modernity: the ambivalence that the French feel towards the Americanisation of their culture in the postwar years is shown to be located at the heart of this fetish. Fetishism will then be located within recent theories of the ‘ev…
Of Mice and Murder
Silk or Nylon
Throwing Caution to the French Wind
Fetishising the Parisian Text-Scape in Frederic Cathala's L'Arbalete
(2007). Fetishising the Parisian Text-Scape in Frederic Cathala's L'Arbalete : La Vraie Vie Commence. Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association: Vol. 2007, No. 108, pp. 111-129
Introduction
In 2002 David Murphy argued for a de-centring of French Studies. Integral to this process he considered a postcolonial theory of Francophone cultures that would facilitate a conceptual move away from the “metropolitan ‘centre’ as the source of [the Francophone world’s] ‘peripheral’ cultural production”. This argument, which encompasses the place of Francophone studies within contemporary French Studies departments, was rekindled five years later …
Une seule ou plusieurs femmes-truies? Une lecture virtualisante de Truismes de Marie Darrieussecq
Depuis la parution de Truismes de Marie Darrieussecq en 1996, une approche critique a prolifere selon laquelle l’histoire serait celle d’une metamorphose. La double identite de la protagoniste, la dualite de cette heroine oscillant entre femme et truie, a ete trop seduisante pour que ses lecteurs se demandent si cette pluralite du texte ne serait pas plutot illusoire. Loin d’une transformation, ce que nous voyons dans ce roman est plutot la mise …
L'ÉLÉGante De La Rue Lepic
Larry Schehr
French Studies and Creative Writing
Traduit de l'américain’ from Poe to the Série Noire
This article reviews the new light shed in 1952 on Charles Baudelaire's translation and critical analysis of Edgar Allan Poe by W.T. Bandy, which exposed the French poet's plagiarism of American sources. Our aim here is to suggest that Baudelaire's Poe project, with its wilful problematisation of originality and translation, author and translator, preempts Marcel Duhamel's own translation project of 1945, the Série Noire. We compare these two Par…
The Practices of Translation
As commentators such as Brian Nelson have argued, literary translation is “a distinctive form of creative writing” that constitutes a “performance” of the source text. The fact that there can exist different translations of a given literary work, for example, is proof enough of the creative role played by the translator. It demonstrates that the translator has choices – choices that are far from trivial, especially when it comes to dealing with w…
Intertextuality as Translatability
In this article, a text, in this case an Australian crime novel, is analyzed in terms of its translatability. The framework adopted here is influenced by deconstructionism, and especially intertextuality, and as such translatability is taken as an inherent tendency of a text to extend beyond its own formal limits and to map itself onto a virtual, foreign version of itself. This mechanics will be shown to be reflected in the structure of Barry Mai…
Ridges on the floors of Hell»
The Dead Heart is American author Douglas Kennedy’s first novel. It was first translated into French in 1997 as Cul-de-sac . It was this translation that made Kennedy a household name in France and that gave The Dead Heart its identity as a roman noir. In the space of just 20 years the novel has been translated twice into French and adapted twice more, as a film and now as a graphic novel. Elsewhere, we have analyzed this trajectory from the pers…
The Larrikin as Hero (in French Studies)
In this article, we set out to contextualise and analyse the current situation of French Studies in Australia through a brief consideration of both the history of the Australian Journal of French Studies, the discipline itself in the Australian context, and the research context within which that discipline currently finds itself. We suggest that whilst the qualifier "Australian" in the title of AJFS is, in important respects, not at all important…
Serializing Sullivan
In 2010, 51 years after his death in 1959, Boris Vian entered the canon of French literary immortals: he was published in Gallimard’s prestigious Bibliothèque de la Pléiade collection. Arguably, however, these are the complete fictional works of two authors: French writer Boris Vian and his black American pseudonymous creation, Vernon Sullivan. For critics like Edmund Smyth this must have represented long overdue recognition of the qualities of t…
Mobile Criticism
Idiosyncratic to the core, French literary critic Pierre Bayard is a divisive figure commonly dismissed as lightweight or as a subverter of academic standards. In this article, we present an alternative view, arguing that Bayard's recent works constitute a systematic attempt to dismantle the dominant "textualist" paradigm of literary studies. We pursue this project across three clusters of experimentation in Bayard's critical writings, each of wh…
An Ankle Queerly turned, or the fetishised bodies in Agatha Christie'sThe Body in the Library
This article takes as its point of departure a fetishistic scene from the 2004 ITV television adaptation of Agatha Christie's The Body in the Library in order to demonstrate (1) how fetishism itself is a form of adaptation and thus how adaptation functions fetishistically; (2) how the fetishism diaplayed in the 2004 adaptation of the The Body in the Library reflexively references a more primal fetishism at work in the ‘original’ text; and (3) how…
Vernon Sullivan’s alter ego interpretation
This article takes as its point of departure a number of commonly assumed ideas, or idées reçues, that have, in combination, condemned Vernon Sullivan’s novel J’irai cracher sur vos tombes to the role of crime fiction parody. In order to dispel such myths as the Série Noire’s unproblematic use of translation to usher American crime novels into a France craving Americana after the end of the Second World War, this article analyses Sullivan’s novel…
Pierre Bayard and the Ironies of Detective Criticism
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 critici…
On Moving and (Inter) Disciplinarity
Our aim in this introduction is to position all the articles that comprise this special issue of the Australian Journal of French Studies within a framework of mobility while highlighting how they each, individually, test and move (beyond) certain frames. We are also writing in response to the annual conference of the Australian\nSociety for French Studies, which we co-convened in 2015 and at which the articles included here were presented. As we…
Pratiques Scandaleuses
The Série Noire was born out of literary scandals (Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Kathleen Winsor's Forever Amber) and traded on them. Marcel Duhamel's mission statement of 1948 promised readers violence and depravity. Its early focus on translations of so-called American thrillers also led to scandalous cases of French authors masquerading as Americans (Boris Vian's role in the Vernon Sullivan affair shocked Paris in 1946 and shone light on…
Homogenizing the Radical, or Vice Versa? Adapting (to) The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
This article explores the 2000 telemovie adaptation of Agatha Christie’s classic crime novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) to look at ideas of the need (or not) to be faithful to an original text. The authors unpack some of the issues that surround the often controversial notion of the “canon” in detective fiction and present the telemovie as an example of the text’s critical difference
Saving Paris from Nostalgia
This article pays tribute to Brian Nelson’s understanding of translation as literary analysis. The source texts that it engages with are Baudelaire’s poems, which Clive Scott admits to hearing everywhere. In order to save Baudelaire’s Paris from nostalgia, I translate Ross Chambers’s notion of the “urban jumble” far from its urban home and hear, or rather see, it in the English countryside of Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz (2007). And the key ungrammati…
Art (25 works) · History (19 works) · Literature (16 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Sociology (16 works) · History (15 works) · Art history (12 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Linguistics and Discourse Analysis (7 works)