True Crime

<p>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 <em>True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity.</em> <br><em>True Crime</em> 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, <em>True Crime</em> is a penetrating look at modern violence and the modern media and the ties that bind them in contemporary life.<br> </p> 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