The course will enable students to develop a historical, cultural-psychological, formal, critical, and epistemological understanding of true crime. By examining its origins, modes of operation, and the reasons for its widespread dissemination across different domains of modern and contemporary culture, from literature to cinema to podcasting, students will gain insight into its significance from critical, ethical, and aesthetic perspectives.
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The course explores true crime as a transmedial narrative form and as a cultural dispositif through which modern societies represent crime, violence, and the search for truth. Adopting a comparative perspective, it examines the transformations of crime narratives across different media and cultural contexts, including journalism, photography, literature, cinema, television, radio/podcasting, documentary, and digital platforms. Particular attention is devoted to the dynamics of writing, adaptation, rewriting, circulation, and intermedial and intercultural reception that shape the genre. The course also investigates the ethical, political, and aesthetic implications of representing crime, the relationships between fact and fiction, memory and testimony, and the role of audiences in the modern and contemporary construction of narratives of the real.
