Crimes of Art and Terror [Hardcover]

Frank Lentricchia (Author), Jody McAuliffe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 15, 2003 | ISBN-10: 0226472051 | ISBN-13: 978-0226472058 | Edition: 1

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.

Editorial Reviews

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.

From the Inside Flap

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.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 200 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (October 15, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226472051
• ISBN-13: 978-0226472058
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,696,737 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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0 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Mostly literary criticism applied to the current situation, December 20, 2004

By 

Bruce P. Barten (Saint Paul, MN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Crimes of Art and Terror (Hardcover)

CRIMES OF ART AND TERROR (2003) from The University of Chicago Press has a definite point of view in which the feelings of writers are often treated as being more important than society as it is, for writers are pictured as desiring a great change that can only be accomplished by violating society's norms. Early in the book, society is given the opportunity to assert its own preferences against Karlheinz Stockhausen, an opera composer who has used a Lucifer character regularly in a series of seven operas. A four-day concert festival was cancelled in Hamburg after comments Stockhausen made on the events of September 11, 2001, based on early reports. He was inspired by the idea that "people practice like crazy for ten years, totally fanatically for a concert, and then die." (p. 6). "You have people so concentrated on one performance, and then 5,000 people are dispatched into eternity, in a single moment." (p. 7).

The second chapter compares the aims of William Wordsworth, The Unabomber, and Don DeLillo. In the third chapter, the relationship between Norman Mailer and author killer Jack Henry Abbott is explained by passages from Fyodor Dostoevsky's CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, Martin Scorsese's movie, `The King of Comedy,' and Bret Easton Ellis's character Patrick Bateman in the novel AMERICAN PSYCHO. I am not familiar with the details of the following chapters, but Chapter 7 is called "The Last Maniacal Folly of Heinrich Von Kleist (A Fiction)." (pp. 148-165). A Short Bibliography lists works with ideas that have contributed to each of the seven chapters. Then Works Cited (pp. 173-175) includes a web page for Karlheinz Stockhausen. The index (pp. 179-187) includes the designation "mentioned" under Wordsworth for three pages where his name merely appears. Dostoevsky also has two pages listed for "mentioned." T. S. Eliot takes 5 lines in the index, with only one page designated "mentioned." This kind of index is valuable for readers who often wish to locate what they previously read and check the relevance of offhanded comments.

My interest in the book was mainly due to its look at Theodore John Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who is definitely both a writer and a criminal in a way that relates to the theme of this book. Offhandedly, Ted's manifesto is subject to comments that illustrate a mentality that is ultimately individual:

`Under normal grammatical conditions, as opposed to the conditions of Unabomber grammar, it is not possible to say that "civilization" is "criminal."' (p. 78).

Ted was willing to plead guilty to avoid a trial that would seek the death penalty because he did not want to claim insanity to avoid punishment. The defense team of lawyers had taken steps to substantiate insanity, but the preliminary issue of how competent Ted was to act in his own defense kept the trial from proceeding smoothly to a determination of that issue. Thus I vaguely disagree with the assertion in this book that "Like the Unabomber, Raskolnikov is tried on an insanity defense because the world cannot accept the actions of such terrorists as rational." (p. 49). I used to have an editorial cartoon on my wall in which lawyers behind Ted's back were making loony bin gestures while Ted was trying to protect all his Constitutional rights and the judge was trying to decipher the confusion about who was representing Ted's best interests. Ted was going to be tried on the contents of his diary, which was written in a code that was found in his cabin, and the pleasure he finally displayed in being able to admit that he was the author of the Unabomber manifesto ought to balance the displeasure of those sentenced to years in prison for illegal substances that messed up their minds in ways that illustrate the concept of transgressive desire as much as this book does.