title: Not What We Remember But How And Why: High-Profile Crime in Fiction And Popular Culture
Creators: name: Costello, Stephanie
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2024

description: Fiction provides a powerful and important means through which to examine high-profile crime. Few people will be victims of the sort of crimes that dominate newspaper front pages. However, in bearing witness to tragedy via the media and popular culture, these events can be experienced as cultural traumas. This thesis contends that the Columbine High School shooting (1999), the Manson Family murders (1969), and the Jonestown massacre (1978) constitute three such cultural traumas. Our experience of them has been mediated through our exposure to different representations of these crimes, from mass media to popular culture. These representations help to embed these events into the cultural memory.

This thesis will trace the development of fictional portrayals of school shootings across five decades, using cultural trauma theory and literary trauma theory to explore these events through their place in popular culture and fiction. This timeline reflects upon representations produced before and after the Columbine shooting, the crime that would come to define school violence, and how attitudes have changed across this period. In doing so, this thesis will examine how the popular narratives around school shootings have changed, thus suggesting that committing them to cultural memory is a dynamic and ongoing process. It examines how the novels use literary devices such as fragmentation and multiperspectivity to represent trauma and memory.

Consideration will also be afforded to the ways in which fiction has represented cults by examining four novels written in the 2010s. Charles Manson and Jim Jones loom large in cult mythology. However, fiction has sought to look beyond these figureheads and understand the complex human experiences of cult members. By creating a dialogue between the historical context of the events being represented and the contemporary context of the authors of the fiction, this thesis will demonstrate that cultural memory is not the same as historical record. Instead, crafting cultural narratives around these events is a sensemaking endeavour. Storytelling becomes a powerful tool for reflecting on how cultural traumas are interpreted and memorialised. This thesis will examine how the novels represent responses to trauma through the use of genre conventions, narrative structure, and other literary devices.

Building narratives around trauma helps to make sense of them. However, sometimes these narratives can oversimplify, exclude, or erroneously represent the experiences of those involved. Fiction which seeks to portray a variety of perspectives reiterates the large and complex human experiences of these cultural traumas, restoring nuance and individuality to those they depict. Narrative fiction demonstrates the tension in the representability of trauma. Trauma is, by its very nature, difficult to represent. However, fiction does not shy away from this difficulty. The novels explored in this thesis employ a range of narrative frameworks and literary devices to represent trauma. In doing so, this thesis establishes that the value of fiction lies not in simply retelling history but considering why and how we do so.