In this provocative cultural study, the serial killer emerges as a central figure in what Mark Seltzer calls 'America's wound culture'. From the traumas displayed by talk show guests and political candidates, to the violent entertainment of Crash or The Alienist, to the latest terrible report of mass murder, we are surrounded by the accident from which we cannot avert our eyes. Bringing depth and shadow to our collective portrait of what a serial killer must be, Mark Seltzer draws upon popular sources, scholarly analyses, and the language of psychoanalysis to explore the genesis of this...
In this provocative cultural study, the serial killer emerges as a central figure in what Mark Seltzer calls 'America's wound culture'. From the traum...
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...
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 pop...
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...
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 pop...
Bodies and Machines is a striking and persuasive examination of the body-machine complex and its effects on the modern American cultural imagination. Bodies and Machines, first published in 1992, explores the links between techniques of representation and social and scientific technologies of power in a wide range of realist and naturalist discourses and practices. Seltzer draws on realist and naturalist writing, such as the work of Hawthorne and Henry James, and the discourses which inform it: from scouting manuals and the programmes of systematic management to accounts of sexual biology and...
Bodies and Machines is a striking and persuasive examination of the body-machine complex and its effects on the modern American cultural imagination. ...
In his virtuosic new book noted cultural critic Mark Seltzer shows how suspense, as art form and form of life, depicts and shapes the social systems that organize our modern world. Modernity's predicament, Seltzer writes, is a society so hungry for reality that it cannot stop describing itself, and that makes for a world that continuously establishes itself by staging its own conditions. Employing the social theories of Georg Simmel, Erving Goffman, Niklas Luhmann, and Peter Sloterdijk, Seltzer shows how suspense novels, films, and performance art by Patricia Highsmith, Tom McCarthy, Cormac...
In his virtuosic new book noted cultural critic Mark Seltzer shows how suspense, as art form and form of life, depicts and shapes the social systems t...
In his virtuosic new book noted cultural critic Mark Seltzer shows how suspense, as art form and form of life, depicts and shapes the social systems that organize our modern world. Modernity's predicament, Seltzer writes, is a society so hungry for reality that it cannot stop describing itself, and that makes for a world that continuously establishes itself by staging its own conditions. Employing the social theories of Georg Simmel, Erving Goffman, Niklas Luhmann, and Peter Sloterdijk, Seltzer shows how suspense novels, films, and performance art by Patricia Highsmith, Tom McCarthy, Cormac...
In his virtuosic new book noted cultural critic Mark Seltzer shows how suspense, as art form and form of life, depicts and shapes the social systems t...
