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SoSe 21: True Story: American Crime Writing from Poe to Podcasts

Tobias Alexander Jochum

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The rise of crime fiction as a prominent literary genre in the United States coincided with the arrival of industrialized modernity and mass media. The murder of a beautiful woman—once famously called "the most poetical topic in the world" by Edgar Allan Poe—has problematically remained the master trope of the form since its inception. True Crime's particular allure then—in addition to the often voyeuristic spectacularization of victimhood and the concurrent fascination with a singular, unfathomable "evil"—lies in its claim to authenticity, which has helped it endure as a hybrid mode that went through several formal and stylistic transformations over time. If the traditional genre template purges challenges to the status quo by banishing acts of violence into the realm of aberration—the solving of the crime effectively re-establishing social order—a recent resurgence of the genre in TV and podcast (but also written formats) re-purposes and contextualizes the crime scene as a metonymic space to extrapolate critiques of structural injustices along vectors of class, race, and gender.This seminar turns to canonical and non-canonical examples of true-crime writing to grapple with their aesthetic, ethical, and political implications. How is reality—history, subjectivity, affective spaces—constructed in these self-declared "truth" narratives? By which means do these texts reinforce or confront power relations of their respective historical eras? And how can we, as readers, approach sensationalist texts trafficking in scenes of gendered or racialized violence in a manner that avoids the symbolic re-victimization of marginalized communities? The syllabus includes writing by E.A. Poe, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Jorge Ibargüengoitia, James Ellroy, Maggie Nelson and Marlon James; as well as the podcast series Serial and recent Netflix miniseries When They See Us and Unbelievable. close