Pictures at an Execution : An Inquiry into the Subject of Murder - Hardcover

Lesser, Wendy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674667352 ISBN 13: 9780674667358

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1994

Synopsis

This book is about murder―in life and in art―and about how we look at it and feel about it. At the center of Lesser’s investigation is a groundbreaking legal case in which a federal court judge was asked to decide whether a gas chamber execution would be broadcast on public television.

About this title

About the Author

Wendy Lesser is editor of The Threepenny Review.

Reviews

"Murder literature forces us, or lures us, or invites us to identify with the murderer. It is an invitation we readily accept," declares Lesser in this alternately stimulating inquiry. Editor of The Threepenny Review , Lesser ( His Other Half: Men Looking at Women Though Art ) here takes as her theme why we are drawn to murder as real-life spectacle and in art. A 1991 San Francisco trial in which KQED-TV sued San Quentin prison's warden for denying the station permission to broadcast the execution of a convicted murderer forms the centerpiece of Lesser's meditation; she views capital punishment as state-sanctioned murder. Shuttling between fact and fiction, she offers a rarefied analysis of murder as depicted in a vast array of movies, novels, stories, mysteries, TV shows, true-crime books, plays and photojournalism. Ranging from Poe to Joe McGinniss and Norman Mailer, from Macbeth to Silence of the Lambs , her searching essay will appeal most to intellectual murder buffs. First serial to Los Angeles Times Magazine.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The germination of this book was a California lawsuit to televise the execution of Robert Alton Harris, but, like a crack in a china saucer, Pictures branches out to examine many more issues. Inevitably, questions bubble up about making the event a spectacle; crossing the threshold into the barbaric; and violating this or any inmate's privacy. Digging deeper, Lesser considers how much sympathy a murderer engenders. Do we sympathize partly because we can see ourselves in him and partly because he is dropped into the interminable justice system? If we read a story about a fictional murderer, what lessons do we learn about our capacity to feel, to be absorbed in the drama, to remain detached? For some answers, Lesser sifts through Poe, Turgenev, Didion, Fearing, among others, and reinforces her points with help from writers who have examined real-life murderers. Essential for those seriously contemplating their position on guilt, grief, punishment, responsibility, and cruelty. Lesser has produced a stunning effort that will leave questions echoing in readers' minds after the book is closed.
- Lisa Nussbaum, Euclid P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674667352
• ISBN 13: 9780674667358
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 270