Murder/Media/Modernity

Abstract

Abstract: This article has been drawn from a larger study by the author, True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity. Here the focus is on a minor genre—true crime—thatat the same time is a scale model of modern society. True crime is crime fact that reads like, or looks like, crime fiction. It is one of the popular genres of our pathological public sphere and an integral part of our contemporary “wound culture.” True crime maps that vague and shifting region between real and fictional reality where mass belief resides. Thus, the known world of true crime—the world as the scene of the crime—is bound up through and through with the reality of the mass media. Via instances of true crime (from the work of Haruki Murakami to the forensic work of CSI) and via instances of its fictional codependent, the crime novel, this account traces the media a priori of modern society and “the crime system” that binds modern violence and the modern media today.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.