CFP

Europeanness in Contemporary Crime Fiction

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“Unified in Diversity?”

The Promotion and Reception of Europeanness in Contemporary Crime Fiction

Call for abstracts

While there is clearly still some way to a European media market that knows no borders––there is certainly not yet a single European market, and there are still a great many frontiers and boundaries to negotiate––, one must acknowledge that crime narratives travel extremely well in Europe, be it in the form of literary fiction, film or television series. From the perspective of cultural studies, this harbours the potential for transnational exchange, transculturalism, and the emergence of a shared European identity, thus serving as a vehicle for cultural exchange and debate.
On the other hand, one might argue that crime shows which do stress their Europeanness by means of location marketing and inviting cultural tourism are fundamentally Europuddings by appropriating a well proven storytelling formula and setting these narratives to European locations, which are exotic and appealing to most of the audience worldwide. In that sense, one might question whether the generic concept of Noir, which has certainly travelled from the very North to the very South of Europe, enables a European dialogue or jumps from the regional/local to the global and thereby skipping notions of Europeanness.
The aim of this proposed panel is to examine whether, and how, crime narratives are advertised as European in promotional material such as trailers, covers, posters, copywriting, ads and the like. At the same time, we invite case studies which do not only focus on the promotional strategies but also focus on reception by looking at newspapers, magazines, websites, social media, and so on. This panel will therefore explore how Europeanness has been conveyed through promotional strategies, and will discuss which factors have proven relevant for this Europeanness to be detected by critics and audiences.

We invite case studies in literary fiction, film and television series. For example, we are looking for analyses of cross-media phenomena such as Inspector Montalbano, the Millenium trilogy, or Babylon Berlin, which originated from literary works and became transnationally successful television series. Such cases would be especially interesting since the market logic for audiences in literary and screen reception is still markedly different. We are also particularly interested in case studies about television series such as The Team, Crossing Lines, or Eurocops, whose presumed Europeanness is already embedded in their production process.

Please send your abstract until April 10th 2019 to both federico.pagello@unibo.it and M.Schleich@qub.ac.uk
This panel will be part of the conference “EURONOIR: Producers, distributors and audiences of European crime narratives“ held from the 30th September to October 2nd 2019 at the Aalborg University in Denmark.

Fictions of Organised Crime

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Call for Contributions: Fictions of Organised Crime – Themed Issue of New Readings
 
organized crime
 
Crime fiction is one of the most significant popular means of exploring the contradictions that emerge from the modern, bourgeois capitalist nation state (Pepper 2016). Most fiction about ‘organised crime’ is preoccupied with violent, interpersonal crime or the behaviours of mafia-like groups. But there are other, more ubiquitous and insidious harmful practices — political, financial, environmental, etc. — that affect all of us and are not necessarily proscribed by law. The ‘slow violence’ inflicted on populations by the carbon industry, the financial harms of politicians and transnational corporations are not always recognised as ‘crime’ and fit less easily within the standard forms of genre fiction. This themed edition of New Readings, Fictions of Organised Crime, asks how culture can address these kinds of carefully organised harms. How does fiction account for the complexities of state-facilitated environmental crime, financial crime and the activities of organisations dedicated to the subversion of democracy? How can locally and regionally produced cultural representations respond to globally organised activities?

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“Delicate Infractions”: Innovations, Expansions, and Revolutions in the Crime Genre (CFP)

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International Crime Genre Research Group: 8th Biennial Conference

 

Death and the compass

“Delicate Infractions”: Innovations, Expansions, and Revolutions in the Crime Genre

Friday 14 – Saturday 15 June, 2019

Maynooth University, Ireland

The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges famously remarked that the detective genre “thrives on the continual and delicate infraction of its rules”. Taking this as a point of departure, the 8th Biennial conference of the International Crime Fiction Research Group will aim to bring together researchers with a shared interest in exploring how the genre has changed and continues to change by way of such delicate infractions, but also occasionally by way of full-blown transgression and definitive ruptures.

Under the broad title of “Delicate Infractions”, we invite proposals related to the following areas:

Systemic troubles reflected in the crime genre

  • The crime genre in the age of Black Lives Matter, Trump and resurgent far-right ideology.
  • The representation and promotion of radical politics in crime narrative.
  • Genre responses to the refugee crisis in Europe and beyond.
  • How can or should the genre reckon with the ‘slow violence’ of pollution, climate change, ocean acidification, and ecocide?

Formal re-configurations of the crime genre:

  • Re-imaginings and re-workings of the tropes of crime.
  • Re-configurations of the archetypal detective/criminal/victim triad.
  • Challenges to the gendered and racialized assumptions of conventional crime narratives.
  • Crime, Modernism, and/or Postmodernism (and beyond).
  • Crime, Surrealism, and the Avant-Garde.
  • Hybrids and intersections with other genres.

Changing technologies and how they influence crime, crime detection, and crime writing

  • The technological pre-conditions for the emergence of the genre.
  • Historic changes or ruptures wrought on the genre since its inception by technological innovations in transport, communications, and weaponry.
  • Cyberspace, Artificial Intelligence, and the elaboration of new kinds of crime and new modes of investigation.
  • Digital Humanities, Big Data, Digital Gazetteers, Crowd Sourcing; New technologies for Crime Fiction Studies.
  • Apps, Immersive Narratives and technology-supported Crime Fiction Tourism.
  • The place of YouTube, Social Media, podcasting, and other online platforms in the publication of crime narrative.
  • New technologies and new experiences of reading Crime Fiction.

As in previous years, we also welcome submissions that do not fall neatly within the above categories (or that expand them), and we are open to research questions that are themselves ‘infractional’ in respect of the critical paradigms that have grown around crime genre scholarship.

Submissions can be centred on crime fiction and/or film, but we also welcome submissions relating to true crime and that analyse other forms of media, as well as examinations of relevant topics within fields such as history, criminology, anthropology etc. Our guiding objective since our first conference in 2005 is to bring together scholars from a diverse range of areas with a view to highlighting and exploring the points of convergence (and divergence) that emerge.

Organising Committee Chair Dr David Conlon (MU). Committee members Dr Dominique Jeannerod (QUB); Dr Kate Quinn (NUIG); Dr Marieke Krajenbrink (UL).

Please send your abstracts to one of the following by November 29th 2018:

david.conlon@mu.ie

d.jeannerod@qub.ac.uk

kate.quinn@nuigalway.ie

marieke.krajenbrink@ul.ie

New Approaches to Studying Crime Narratives

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Tampere
One-day Symposium: “New Approaches to Studying Crime Narratives”
 
October 14, 2016
University of Tampere, Finland
 
First Call for Papers
 
We invite proposals for paper presentations on new approaches to studying crime narratives. We want to encourage participants to introduce and discuss new methodological and theoretical perspectives on how to study literary, televisual and filmic crime narratives, and also to consider recent developments in the field of crime writing itself. The symposium understands crime narratives in a wide sense, as ranging from detective fiction, spy stories, and thrillers to true crime. The symposium also welcomes proposals focusing on crime narratives from various language areas and cultural spheres. We would like to welcome proposals which address the following topics (however, the list is by no means exhaustive):

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Domestic Noir

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CALL FOR CHAPTERS
‘From the Domestic to the Dominant: The New Face of Crime Fiction’
Edited Collection

Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn), The Silent Wife (ASA Harrison), The Girl on the Train (Paula Hawkins), are just three recent novels that have captured the commercial imagination and conceivably shifted the critical perception of what a contemporary crime thriller is and should be doing in the second decade of the 21st Century. The terrain is domestic, the narrative perspective and criminal perpetrator firmly female. However, the political is of course ever present in relation to gender and society. The crime thriller has always been a peculiarly modern form. Its transition to an urgent, necessary and contemporary form of literary expression is arguable, and lies at the core of the discussion within this collection.

Julia Crouch (Cuckoo, The Long Fall, Tarnished and Every Vow You Break) recognised as the originator of the term ‘Domestic Noir’ stated that it ‘takes place primarily in homes and workplaces, concerns itself largely (but not exclusively) with the female experience.’

Domestic Noir is often concerned with crimes of an extremely intimate nature. Renee Knight’s Disclaimer and Claire Kendal’s The Book of You, both deal with unusually invasive forms of stalking. Christobel Kent’s The Crooked House and Erin Kelly’s The Poison Tree both detail the horror of long-buried secrets surfacing. Many of the novels deal explicitly with what Rebecca Whitney (The Liar’s Chair) describes as ‘toxic marriage and its fallout’, such as Emma Chapman’s How to be a Good Wife, and Lucie Whitehouse’s Before we Met. There are also versions of the marriage thriller that present economically or sexually independent women transgressing, such as Louise Doughty’s Apple Tree Yard and Jill Alexander Essbaum’s Hausfrau. Continue reading →