Committing fiction: Crime as cultural symptom in contemporary American literature and film

In figures from Hester Prynne and Huckleberry Finn to Bigger Thomas, the criminal in American literature has traditionally represented the existence and viability of a genuine alternative to dominant social structures and ideoiogy. Crime was the point at which the true individual broke away from the determinant and often corrupt space of the social sphere, a personal declaration of independence. This study suggests that such a vision can no longer be sustained in contemporary texts, in part because, as much contemporary theory teaches us, belief in the true individual can itself no longer be sustained. Despite this, crime continues to be a dominant topic of American novels and films. This study seeks to understand the new functions of crime in these texts through theoretically informed close readings of major fiction by Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Raymond Carver, Richard Price, and Toni Morrison and of the recent American films Blade Runner, The Usual Suspects, Forrest Gump, and Natural Born Killers. Although crime assumes many guises in these texts, the study suggests that an overall shift has occurred which demands that crime now be understood as a break within society, rather than a break from it. Thus seen on a communal, rather than individual, level, crime is revealed as a symptom of cultural and ideological tensions