Killer Love: Passion and Crime in Fiction and Film

Catalog description

Discusses textual and cinematic representations of criminal passion and its ambiguous relationship to religious, moral, and social norms. We will focus on extreme forms of intimacy both as a thematic choice of cultural production and as a symbolic medium of communication. Why is it that art so often explores unsanctioned emotions and deviant behaviors? What is at stake when narratives capitalize on violent manifestations of desire? In what ways is the semantics of excessive love related to conceptions of subjectivity, sociability, and sexuality? What role does it play in the creative process itself?