Murder in Motion by Mirabile, Michael;

Short description:

This book examines the fictional category of thriller through the lens of city life using exegetical tools drawn from urban sociology to locate the mechanism of suspense and determine the significance of representations of anxiety within metropolitan settings against the backdrop of increased mobility and speed of modern life.

Long description:

Murder in Motion examines the fictional category of the thriller – a genre founded on the effects and objects of suspense – through the lens of city dwelling. In particular, the purpose is to locate the mechanism of suspense against the backdrop of the increased mobility and speed of modern life, employing exegetical tools drawn from urban sociology and related fields to determine the significance of representations of anxiety within metropolitan settings.

Existing scholarship has tended to treat suspense as a technique of temporal delay and the thriller as a formal genre. Quite differently, this study reads key (literary, cinematic, and televisual) narratives in relation to epochal transformations of society, from industrialization and modernity to globalization, placing emphasis on the intersection of modern transport and identity. It is a phenomenon the sociologist Hartmut Rosa has designated "social acceleration." It becomes evident through the classical, modernist, and postmodernist phases of the thriller, while the meaning of suspense changes according to the velocity and spatial compressions resulting from technological change.

The audience for the book will be students, instructors, and researchers in literary studies, film studies, and media studies, as well as researchers in sociology and critical theory.

"Murder in Motion draws upon spatiality studies and mobility theory, as well as urbanism and other areas, to look at the ways that 20th- and 21st-century crime fiction reflects the acceleration and velocity of modern urban life. This is an enriching and interesting approach that opens up both classic cinema and newer cinematic texts, and their interrelationship with modern social life."
Robert T. Tally, Professor of English and International Studies, Texas State University

"Most studies of the thriller, whether in fiction, film, or television, approach the subject as a question of genre, which has an acknowledged set of rules that define it. Murder in Motion adopts the methodology of urban sociology as espoused by Paul Virilio, Henri Lefebvre, Walter Benjamin, Marc Augé and others to show how the modern thriller tracks the transformational shifts in society brought on by industrialization and forms of rapid transit. The suspense and the abrupt shift from the ordinary to the extraordinary that are hallmarks of the thriller elucidate the sociological account of modern angst. It’s a thrilling work that will be of social value and importance for some time to come."
Joseph Conte, Professor of English, University of Buffalo

Table of Contents:

Introduction: The Speed of Suspense 1. Mistaken for No One: Intersubjective Transfers on Trains 2. Suspensions of Identity: Social Acceleration and Character 3. The Child Vanishes: Spatial Enclosure in Aero-Thrillers 4. Remapping Espionage: Don DeLillo’s Narratives of Transnational Intrigue 5. New Frontiers for Suspense: Dispatches from the Multiverse Conclusion: The Suspense of Speed