True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity

Abstract

True crime is crime fact that looks like crime fiction. It is one of most popular genres of our pathological public sphere, and an integral part of our contemporary wound culture-a culture, or at least cult, of commiseration. If we cannot gather in face of anything other than crime, violence, terror, trauma, and wound, we can at least commiserate. That is, as novelist Chuck Palahniuk writes, we can at least all [be] miserable together. The murder leisure industry, its media, and its public: these modern styles of violence and intimacy, sociality and belief, are subjects of True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity. True Crime draws on and makes available to American readers—and tests out—work on systems theory and media theory (for instance, transformative work of Niklas Luhmann on social systems and of Friedrich Kittler on media apriori—work yet to make its impact on American scene). True Crime is at once a study of a minor genre that is a scale model of modern society and a critical introduction to these forms of social and media history and theory. With examples, factual and fictional, of scene of crime ranging from Poe to CSI, from true crime writing of popular Japanese author Haruki Murakami to versions of the violence-media complex in work of American novelist Patricia Highsmith and Argentinian author Juan Jose Saer, True Crime is a penetrating look at modern violence and modern media and ties that bind them in contemporary life.

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 — 91 citations exist upstream.