States of Crime: The State in Crime Fiction

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States of Crime: The State in Crime Fiction

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• Arts

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• Publié par: iqejilax
• Nombre de lectures: 52
• Langue: Français

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Fourth Interdisciplinary Conference of theAtlantic Alliance of Universities (NUI Galway, UL, UCC, QUB) Crime Genre Research Group  States of Crime: The State in Crime Fiction th th 17 18of June 2011, Queen's University, Belfast. Call for papers/ Appel à contribution Please send 300-word abstracts of papers to [e-mail] exclusively st Deadline/ Date limite: 31January 2011 Keynote Speaker: Professor Dominique Kalifa, Université Paris 1 Panthéon - Sorbonne Guest Writers: Eoin McNamee, David Peace This conference examines crime fiction through the various manifestations of its relations to the State. State institutions are unlike other protagonists in criminal affairs, due to their monopoly of legitimate violence and have hitherto received comparatively little attention in literary criticism. Yet, shadows of the state apparatus loom large over crime fiction, both within the narration and as a referential background. The emergence of the detective novel mirrors historically the advent of the modern police state. It reflects the creation of an organised network of surveillance and control. Poe’s 'The Purloined Letter' conceals a State affair.genre has The often been shown to display securitarian tendencies. The detective, either himself an agent of the State or a “private eye” objectively fulfilling the role of an auxiliary of justice, classically pursues not only the punishment of deviant individuals, but the restoration of order. At the same time, distinctions between exponents of State order and criminals have been blurred since the origins and the figure of Vidocq.In a similar fashion to Hugo’s couple Valjean/Javert and Dostoievsky’s Raskolnikov/ Porfiri Petrovitch, crime readers’ sympathies have often veered towards the criminal rather than the State. Evolutions within the genre, in the wake of WWI, the Russian revolution and the American Great Depression, have introduced a more explicit critique of State corruption, and of the surrender of public bodies to private interests, lobbies, and organised crime.Post WWII, the “Noir” has accrued its counter cultural credentials with a critique of State oppression, cultural domination, silencing of minorities, and racial and sexist discrimination. Much contemporary crime fiction continues to buttress the authority of the State but at the same time an increased political radicalisation of the genre has developed worldwide in the context of decolonisation and the Vietnam War. Marxist, Anarchist and Post-Situationist crime fiction authors have explored the genre’s subversive potential, while experiencing its constraints and contradictions. As crime fiction's geo-politics reach has expanded, the generic boundaries separating crime, thriller and espionage fiction have been called into question,