True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity

ISBN-13: 9780415977937 / Angielski / Twarda / 2006 / 196 str.

Mark Seltzer

Opis

Browse a bookstore and you will find a healthy shelf labeled "Crime." Beside it may be a smaller, seedier shelf labeled "True Crime." The first is popular crime fiction, the second crime fact. Fictional crime has taken over, writes Mark Seltzer, and the confusion of reality and event has saturated-and even defined-contemporary American culture.
In his widely read "Serial Killers," American studies scholar Mark Seltzer analyzed the American obsession with violent accident-vehicular homicide, serial murders, and other spectacularly awful events. True Crime carries the argument of "Serial Killers" into a broader arena. Using crime as his canvas, Mark Seltzer offers a dazzling analysis of how our cultural fantasies, fears, and desires have blurred the distinction between fiction and real event. As victims of the "CSI-effect," he argues, we've come to see the world as the scene of a crime.
From Edgar Allan Poe's detective stories up to Patricia Highsmith's ambiguous Ripley and the rash of reality TV shows, True Crime is an unblinking look at the thriving "murder leisure industry." It is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand why culture is increasingly defined by and addicted to violence.

Spis treści

Murder/Media/Modernity The Media Apriori Synthetic Witnessing True and False Crime Literacy Tests Crimes against Humanity The Known World The Conventions of True Crime Sin City Normal Violence The National Conversation Crime and Togetherness The Crime System Murder by Numbers Half-Credences; or, The Public Mind True Lies True Romance Medium: Crime, Risk, Counterfactual Life The Tremor of Forgery Precrime Second Thoughts; or, Is It Now? Vicarious Crime Vicarious Life Media Doubling The Train, the Dictaphone, the Merry-Go-Round, and the Movies Berlin 2000: The Image of an Empty Place

Woundscapes The Love Parade Democratic Social Space The Mimesis of Publicness Postscript on the Violence-Media Complex (and Other Games) Notes Index

O autorze

Mark Seltzer is Evan Frankel Professor of English at UCLA. He is author of Bodies and Machines and Serial Killers: Death and Life in America's Wound Culture, both published by Routledge.