The Literature and Cinema of Global Organized Crime

Catalog description

In this course we will examine the demonized, self-consciously romanticized, or pointedly de-glamorized images of organized crime in literature and cinema across the contemporary global village. We will discuss the ways in which literary and cinematic texts portray the lives of organized crime workers within the international marketplace, focusing on the countries within Eastern Europe and Mexico, Italy, France, Japan and India. We will also study theories of confessional and postmodernist narratology, in an effort to de-code representations of the criminal self that finds itself trapped in a world driven by the neoliberal economic policies of outsourcing and transnational mergers.