Seltzer True Crime

Observations on Violence and Modernity
Erscheinungsjahr 2013
ISBN: 978-1-135-86738-6
Verlag: CRC Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

True crime is crime fact that looks like crime fiction. It is one of the 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 the face of anything other than crime, violence, terror, trauma, and the 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 the 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, the transformative work of Niklas Luhmann on social systems and of Friedrich Kittler on the media apriori—work yet to make its impact on the 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 the scene of the crime ranging from Poe to CSI, from the true crime writing of the popular Japanese author Haruki Murakami to versions of "the violence-media complex" in the work of the American novelist Patricia Highsmith and the Argentinian author Juan José Saer, True Crime is a penetrating look at modern violence and the modern media and the ties that bind them in contemporary life.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Seltzer, Mark

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein Empirische Sozialforschung, Statistik
• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Medienwissenschaften
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Freizeitsoziologie, Konsumsoziologie, Alltagssoziologie, Populärkultur
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Populärkultur
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Mediensoziologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- 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

Über Autor(innen)

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.