Crimes of Art and Terror - Hardcover

Lentricchia, Frank; McAuliffe, Jody

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226472051 ISBN 13: 9780226472058

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2003

Synopsis

Do killers, artists, and terrorists need one another? In Crimes of Art and Terror, Frank Lentricchia and Jody McAuliffe explore the disturbing adjacency of literary creativity to violence and even political terror. Lentricchia and McAuliffe begin by anchoring their penetrating discussions in the events of 9/11 and the scandal provoked by composer Karlheinz Stockhausen's reference to the destruction of the World Trade Center as a great work of art, and they go on to show how political extremism and avant-garde artistic movements have fed upon each other for at least two centuries.

Crimes of Art and Terror reveals how the desire beneath many romantic literary visions is that of a terrifying awakening that would undo the West's economic and cultural order. This is also the desire, of course, of what is called terrorism. As the authority of writers and artists recedes, it is criminals and terrorists, Lentricchia and McAuliffe suggest, who inherit this romantic, destructive tradition. Moving freely between the realms of high and popular culture, and fictional and actual criminals, the authors describe a web of impulses that catches an unnerving spirit.

Lentricchia and McAuliffe's unorthodox approach pairs Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment with Martin Scorsese's King of Comedy and connects the real-life Unabomber to the surrealist Joseph Cornell and to the hero of Bret Easton Ellis's bestselling novel American Psycho. They evoke a desperate culture of art through thematic dialogues among authors and filmmakers as varied as Don DeLillo, Joseph Conrad, Francis Ford Coppola, Jean Genet, Frederick Douglass, Hermann Melville, and J. M. Synge, among others. And they conclude provocatively with an imagined conversation between Heinrich von Kleist and Mohamed Atta. The result is a brilliant and unflinching reckoning with the perilous proximity of the impulse to create transgressive art and the impulse to commit violence.

About this title

About the Author:

Frank Lentricchia is the Katherine Everett Gilbert Professor of Literature and Theater Studies in Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University. He is the author or editor of ten critical works, most recently Modernist Quartet, several novels, and a memoir.

Jody McAuliffe is an associate Professor of the Practice in the Department of Theater Studies and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Duke University. She is a director, a fiction writer, and the editor of Plays, Movies, and Critics.

From Publishers Weekly:

Following the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center two years ago, no statement caused more anger than composer Karlheinz Stockhausen's description of it as "the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos," something "we couldn't even dream of in music." Duke University's husband-and-wife team Lentricchia and McAuliffe contend that Stockhausen's pronouncements addressed, however ill-advisedly, connections among art, spectacle, transgression and the Western imagination that many are now eager to sweep under the rug. Moving through Stockhausen to a wide range of material, they ask the difficult question: is Western art's post-Romantic veneration of the destructive, alienated outsider-from Oedipus to Travis Bickle-in any way answerable for the real destruction our culture brings into being? While the book's seven chapters spend a certain amount of time with such expected, even overfamiliar subjects as Don DeLillo's Mao II and Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, it comes most to life with such bold juxtapositions as the boxes of Joseph Cornell and the cabin of Theodore Kaczynski, or Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov and Scorsese's Rupert Pupkin. Likewise, Coppola's Apocalypse Now is read not only through Conrad but also Thomas Mann and John Cassavetes. Ending with an imaginary dialogue between Heinrich Kliest and Mohammad Atta, the book's accessible combination of conceptual daring and moral seriousness places it well above the common run of lit crit.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0226472051
• ISBN 13: 9780226472058
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 200