Andrea Virginas

(Post)modern Crime: Changing Paradigms?: from Agatha Christie to Palahniuk, from Film Noir to Memento Andrea Virginas

Reflecting on processes of (post)modernization in the crime and detection genre resulted in an examination of artistic canons, completed with an analysis of changes in gender representations and poetical-medial alterations surfacing in novels and films. The idea that emerged as the most widespread (post)modern characteristic in my research corpus can be summarized as follows: the process of human representation achieved through media technologies is of a ?deadly? nature. It is therefore by no means accidental that along the axis from the modern to the postmodern the genre of crime fiction is showing more and more medially (self)-conscious moments, segments and story lines, as these are potential ?exits? towards murders and crimes to be committed. While narratives, photographs, letters and moving images are apparently transparent and can serve as traces and clues in modern(ist) detection (although they don't always do), in the postmodern(ist) paradigm they will lead to the identification of the medium at most, instead of the perpetrator of the criminal act.