Section 1 laid the theoretical foundations to the analysis of Christie.docxVIP

Section 1 laid the theoretical foundations to the analysis of Christie’s detective fiction. We now turn to the linguistic analysis of four of her novels to prove the theoretical claims made in the first section of this paper.5.1. Identifying Christie’s style with regard to realising the subject position.In Part 2 we noted that a text conveys an ideology and identified some of the ways in which the writer can create a ‘readerly’ text, by which I mean a text in which he/she aligns the reader’s stance with his/her own worldview. In part 3 we noted the great penetration of the detective genre in the media, especially in Italian television, where it holds a position of “dominance”, and set the question as to why this should be so. In part 4, we examined the general features of the detective story and the features specific to the Golden Age as well as the features specific to Christie. We established that in general terms the two basic functions of the detective genre are that of entertainment and of social-psychological reassurance. In other terms, both functions are ideologically conservative, presupposing extant society as being essentially ‘good’. The former function provides relief from the stress of daily live through ‘light entertainment’ and avoids offering an alternative view of life, while the latter bolsters the social order, reinforcing allegiance to that order, thereby preventing the human being from contemplating alternatives to that social order.Two final issues require treatment. First, the identification of the most basic ideological stance underlying Christie’s work, namely why society as it is is deemed to be ‘good’, and requiring little or no change, and second, the specific linguistic strategies as well as ideational content whereby Christie constructs the subject position and aligns her readership into conformity with her own stance. The answer to the first issue will emerge from the answer to the second question. Furthermore one of the main answers