The corpus delicti
Subtitle: a manual of Argentine fictions
By: Josefina Ludmer ; translated by Glen S. Close.
Contributors: Close, Glen S.
Series: Illuminations; Illuminations (Pittsburgh, Pa.)
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Published: 2004
Place of publication: Pittsburgh
Language: eng
Number of pages: 394
Subjects: Argentine fiction -- History and criticism; Crime in literature
Description: "The Corpus Delicti is a manual of crime, a compendium of crime tales, and an extended meditation on the central role of crime in literature, in life, and in the life of the nation. Beginning with an excerpt from Karl Marx, and characterizing "crime" as a critical instrument that both defines and constructs culture, Ludmer goes far beyond understanding crime and detective fiction as a genre and exposes how literature - both high art and mass culture - function as a hypertext of social reality. She elucidates the relationship of crime and punishment to the formation of law, the body, and the modern state."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes index.
Table of contents: title: Crime as a critical instrument; title: The "stories" of the corpus delicti; title: From transgression to crime. The subjects of the liberal state : stories of education and marriage; title: The patricians and their autobiographical stories of education; title: The dandies and their marriage stories; title: Physics exam stories : insanity, simulation, and crime at the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires; title: The frontier of crime. Transmutation operation stories; title: The crime of the artist : portrait stories; title: Coda; title: The moreiras. Argentine stories; title: The history of a best-seller : from anarchism to Peronism. A literary genealogy "in crime" by way of the story of the submission of the first manuscript to the master; title: Women who kill. Stories of truth and stories of Jews. Stories of truth; title: Stories of Jews; title: Conclusion. The crime story of the very much read.