ICYMI: Christiana Gregoriou, Crime Fiction Migration (Bloomsbury, 2017) @c_gregoriou @BloomsburyBooks

ICYMI: Christiana Gregoriou, Crime Fiction Migration: Crossing Languages, Cultures and Media (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017) (Advances in Stylistics). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

Crime narratives form a large and central part of the modern cultural landscape. This book explores the cognitive stylistic processing of prose and audiovisual fictional crime 'texts'. It also examines instances where such narratives find themselves, through popular demand, 'migrating' - meaning that they cross languages, media formats and/or cultures. In doing so, Crime Fiction Migration proposes a move from a monomodal to a multimodal approach to the study of crime fiction. Examining original crime fiction works alongside their translations, adaptations and remakings proves instrumental in understanding how various semiotic modes interact with one another. The book analyses works such as We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Killing trilogy and the reimaginings of plays such as Shear Madness and films such as Funny Games. Crime fiction is consistently popular and 'on the move' - witness the spate of detective series exported out of Scandinavia, or the ever popular exporting of these shows from the USA. This multimodal and semiotically-aware analysis of global crime narratives expands the discipline and is key reading for students of linguistics, criminology, literature and film.

Law at the US Supreme Court

Jessica Silbey, Suffolk University Law School, and Megan Slack, Slack Law Firm, are publishing The Semiotics of Film in US Supreme Court Cases   in  Law, Culture and Visual Studies (Springer 2014). Here is the abstract.

This chapter explores the treatment of film as a cultural object among varied legal subject matter in US Supreme Court jurisprudence. Film is significant as an object or industry well beyond its incarnation as popular media. Its role in law – even the highest level of US appellate law – is similarly varied and goes well beyond the subject of a copyright case (as a moving picture) or as an evidentiary proffer (as a video of a criminal confession). This chapter traces the discussion of film in US Supreme Court cases in order to map the wide-ranging and diverse ­relations of film to law – a semiotics of film in the high court’s jurisprudence – to decouple the notion of film with entertainment or visual truth.

This chapter discerns the many ways in which the court perceives the role of film in legal disputes and social life. It also illuminates how the court imagines and reconstitutes through its decisions the evolving forms and significances of film and film spectatorship as an interactive public for film in society. As such, this project contributes to the work on the legal construction of social life, exploring how court cases constitute social reality through their legal discourse. It also speaks to film enthusiasts and critics who understand that film is much more than entertainment and is, in practice, a conduit of information and a mechanism for lived experience. Enmeshed in the fabric of society, film is political, commercial, expressive, violent, technologically sophisticated, economically valuable, uniquely persuasive, and, as these cases demonstrate, constantly evolving.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link. 

Barthes, Deconstructed

The New York Times's Sam Anderson on a new, and complete, translation of Roland Barthes's Mythologies.