Table Of ContentThe PoeTics of crime
classical and contemporary
social Theory
series editor: stjepan G. mestrovic, Texas A&m University, UsA
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Also in the series
marx and Weber on oriental societies:
in the shadow of Western modernity
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isBN 978-1-4724-1716-9
imaginative methodologies in the social sciences:
creativity, Poetics and rhetoric in social research
Edited by Michael Hviid Jacobsen, Michael S. Drake,
Kieran Keohane and Anders Petersen
isBN 978-1-4724-0992-8
Utopia: social Theory and the future
Edited by Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Keith Tester
isBN 978-1-4094-0699-0
The Poetics of crime
Understanding and researching crime and
Deviance Through creative sources
Edited by
michAel hviiD JAcoBseN
Aalborg University, Denmark
© The editor and contributors 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
michael hviid Jacobsen has asserted his right under the copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the editor of this work.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British library
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
The poetics of crime : understanding and researching crime and deviance through creative
sources / [edited] by michael hviid Jacobsen.
pages cm. -- (classical and contemporary social theory)
includes bibliographical references and index.
isBN 978-1-4094-6995-7 (hardback : alk. paper) -- isBN 978-1-4094-6996-4 (ebook)
-- isBN 978-1-4094-6997-1 (epub)
1. criminology--research. 2. criminology--social aspects. 3. crime in popular
culture. 4. crime--sociological aspects. i. Jacobsen, michael hviid, 1971-
hv6024.5.P64 2014
364--dc23
2014015764
isBN 9781409469957 (hbk)
isBN 9781409469964 (ebk)
isBN 9781409469971 (epub)
V
Printed in the United Kingdom by henry ling limited,
at the Dorset Press, Dorchester, DT1 1hD
Contents
List of Figures vii
List of Contributors ix
Acknowledgements xiii
Introduction: Towards the Poetics of Crime: Contours of a Cultural,
Critical and Creative Criminology 1
Michael Hviid Jacobsen
Part I: PoetIcs In crIme – PoetIcs of crIme
1 The Phenomenology of Arrest: A Case Study in the Poetics
of Police–Citizen Encounters 29
Jonathan M. Wender
2 In the Garden with ‘Creative Crime’: Kudzu and the Third Branch 51
Avi Brisman
3 Crime Caught in Time: The Poetics of Police Photography 71
Poul Duedahl
Part II: crIme In fIctIon
4 Measure for Measure: Justice in the Society of Censure 97
Colin Sumner
5 Mark Twain and the Corruption of a Town 119
Vincenzo Ruggiero
6 Historical Crime Novels and Meta-Reflective Aesthetics 131
Gunhild Agger
7 The Mafia and Palermo in the Postmodern Urban Imaginary:
Cercando Palermo 151
Robin Pickering-Iazzi
vi The Poetics of Crime
Part III: crIme and contemPorary PoPular culture
8 Media Myths Regarding Serial Killers: A Gothic Criminology 173
Caroline Joan (Kay) S. Picart
9 Imaginaries of Crime, Fantasies of Justice: Popular Criminology
and the Figure of the Superhero 193
Majid Yar
10 The Poetics of Prisonization: Creative Criminology Through
the Projector 209
Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Anders Petersen
Part IV: creatIVe crImInologIes
11 When Prison Blossoms into Art: Dance in Prison as
an Embodied Critical, Creative and Performative Criminology 237
Sylvie Frigon
12 Trauma, Visual Victimology and the Poetics of Justice 263
Sandra Walklate, Ross McGarry and Gabe Mythen
13 Manifesto for a Criminology Beyond Method 285
Jeff Ferrell
Index 303
List of Figures
1.1 The Intrusion–Intimacy Matrix 40
3.1 ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the most
dangerous of all?’ 72
3.2 Notorious Danish gang-leader Hans Jacob Mortensen
photographed by the police authorities in Copenhagen in 1851 74
3.3 Shoemaker Knud Frederik Christian Simonsen arrested for
murder and photographed by the Copenhagen Police in
August 1863 77
3.4 Poverty led to theft, but this rarely had any impact on the length
of the resulting sentence 78
3.5 When the Swedish citizen, Lars Olsson, was arrested in 1900
by the Svendborg Police for violence and theft, it turned out that
he had already served a prison sentence and had been expelled
from Denmark once 80
3.6 23-year-old ‘singer’ Laura Heuser, arrested in August 1878
by the Copenhagen Police and suspected of being a prostitute 81
3.7 The observation tubes in the Danish penal institutions were
often scratched and not easy to look through because of prisoners
preventing the prison staff from watching them 83
3.8 Public authorities have always been interested in deviants, because
they often tend to be an economic and moral burden to society, and
they thus collect a wealth of information about them 85
3.9 Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914) gave several courses for French
and foreign police officers 86
3.10 With the introduction of Bertillon photographic methods, it was
no longer possible to hide the element of coercion, due to
registration numbers, neck braces and mirrors 88
viii The Poetics of Crime
3.11 The crime scene in the Holsteinsgade murder case of 1912 90
3.12 Mug shot of Poul Hansen-Vinding shortly after being arrested
for the murder of plumber Carl Kock in Holsteinsgade in
Copenhagen in 1912 90
3.13 Apparently a normal mug shot – taken frontally and in profile –
and at the same time not quite that 92
3.14 People portrayed on mug shots relate to the circumstances
surrounding the photo shoot 92
11.1 Photo: © Patrick Berger 244
11.2 Photo: © Patrick Berger 245
11.3 Photo: © Patrick Berger 247
11.4 Photo: © Patrick Berger 248
11.5 Photo: © Patrick Berger 252
11.6 Photo: © Guillaume Ménard-Lebel, 2012 255
11.7 Photo: © Guillaume Ménard-Lebel, 2012 255
11.8 Photo: © Guillaume Ménard-Lebel, 2012 257
12.1 World Trade Centre, New York, 11th September 2001 269
12.2 John Tulloch, London, 7th July 2005 272
12.3 Sissel Wilsgaard, Oslo, 22nd July 2011 276
List of Contributors
Gunhild Agger is Professor at the Department of Culture and Global Studies,
Aalborg University, Denmark. Her research areas include: the history of media
and genre, television drama, national and transnational film, bestsellers and
blockbusters. She has published/edited a number of books and articles, among
them The Aesthetics of Television (2001), “Emotion, Gender and Genre:
Investigating The Killing” (2011) and “Histoire et culture médiatique: le roman
policier historique en Scandinavie” (2010).
Avi Brisman is Assistant Professor in the School of Justice Studies at Eastern
Kentucky University in Richmond, KY, United States. He is co-editor of
the Routledge International Handbook of Green Criminology, co-editor of
Environmental Crime and Social Conflict: Contemporary and Emerging Issues
(Ashgate, 2014), and co-author of Green Cultural Criminology: Constructions of
Environmental Harm, Consumerism, and Resistance to Ecocide (Routledge, 2014).
Poul Duedahl is Associate Professor of History at the Department of Culture
and Global Studies, Aalborg University, Denmark. He specializes in global
history and cultural encounters, but his research is also concerned with historical
sociology and the cultural history of crime. He is author of the Danish bestseller,
Forbrydelsens Ansigt [The Face of Crime] (2013) about the history of Danish
police photography.
Jeff Ferrell is Professor of Sociology at Texas Christian University, United
States, and Visiting Professor of Criminology at the University of Kent, United
Kingdom. His current research concerns the sociology and criminology of drift.
His books include: Crimes of Style (1996), Tearing Down the Streets (2001),
Empire of Scrounge (2006), and, with Keith Hayward and Jock Young, Cultural
Criminology: An Invitation (2008).
Sylvie Frigon is Professor at the Department of Criminology at the University
of Ottawa where she is the Chairholder of the Joint Chair of Women’s Studies
with Carleton University. She is Visiting Fellow at Peterhouse, University of
Cambridge, UK (2014). Alongside academic publications, she has published
two novels, Écorchées (2006) on the issue of women in prison, and Ariane et
son secret (2010) on a little girl’s quest for her imprisoned mother. She has
also worked with Claire Jenny, choreographer and director of the Parisian dance
company Point Virgule, with whom she published a book on dance in prison
