Candace Hicks, Many Mini Murder Scenes

Women & Their Work Gallery, Austin, TX, 29 September - 8 November 2018This review examines works by artist Candace Hicks, with special attention given to those in the 2018 exhibit Many Mini Murder Scenes. Hicks’s practice as a printmaker and book artist explores embroidered composition notebooks, encoded text in books and on posters, and interactive exhibits. The pieces in this exhibit include dioramas from murder mystery novel scenes with invisible ink clues and contrasting large scale papercraft images.

Ghosts (Jean Echenoz)

In this chapter, I examine how Jean Echenoz transforms and repurposes popular genres—specifically crime fiction and the war novel--in subtly political manners. Through readings of Echenoz’s (anti-)mystery novel A Year (1997) and his short war novel 1914 (2012), I show how Echenoz smuggles biopolitical and spectral problematics into his works, enlarging the conceptual scope of popular story forms and genre fictions. My reading of Echenoz positions him not as a writer that brings us back to the pleasures of story, but rather as a writer who demonstrates how we can alter the generic conventions and narrative strategies of popular violent fiction in order to account for biopolitical exclusion and mediated phantom pain. Echenoz is thus a writer who shows us some ingenious strategies for rethinking the uses of forms and genres.

"Secret Secrets" as a Principle of the Plotary Organization of the Novel of Vsevolod Ivanov "Ilyich Avenue"

Ivanov’s work “Ilyich Avenue”, as a work “returned”, is examined in the context of the ideological and aesthetic closeness of his book “The Secret Secrets”, also recently introduced into scientific circulation. The military theme, the plot of opposition to the enemy allows the main substantive and constructive principle of the book of Vs. Ivanov’s stories through a combination of real and “secret” to function in the novel at the intertextual level, echoing the works of classics and contemporaries of the writer. The closeness of the novel to the military works of L. Tolstoy and A. Platonov, as well as similarities with the construction of the novel by B. Pasternak “Doctor Zhivago”, are found. The principle of “estrangement”, evident in depicting the realities of the life of the city and the factory, heroes and their actions, with the tangible presence of the Siberian-“eastern” “material”, extends to the plot of the novel “Ilyich Avenue”. Analysis of some storylines related to the main characters’ relations: the scene of acquaintance, forays into the camp of the Nazis, the defense of the Palace of Culture, etc., reveals the use of the “error” technique known in the literature, as well as “recognition / non-recognition” in the aspect of poetics “secrets” and “mystery novel”. Subsequently, he entered the recordings of Vs. Ivanov on the theory of literature. The presence of these signs is confirmed by comparison with the novel by B. Pasternak “Doctor Zhivago”, which also contains “enigmatic intrigue”, which serves as an important structural principle of this work. For the novel “Ilyich Avenue”, these features, organic in relation to the work of B. Pasternak, are in complex relations with the content side, entering into a certain discord with the theme of war and the author’s anti-war pathos. This was reflected in the apparent incompleteness of the novel, submitted undated edition of the text. At the same time, such “incompleteness” is one of the leading signs of Ivanov’s creativity in general, which emanated from the poetics of the “secret secrets”, suggesting an understatement. The succession of the novel “Ilyich Avenue” the main book of the writer of the mid-20s it is proved, therefore, in the aspect of the plot organization of this novel.

Decadent aesthetics and Richard Marsh’s The Mystery of Philip Bennion’s Death

Richard Marsh’s fiction made a significant contribution to the arguments that circulated during the 1890s about aesthetics and the commodification of culture. The plots of sensational popular novels and the sights and sounds of the music hall were all deemed unworthy, addiction-inducing forces by cultural commentators at the time. This chapter focuses on The Mystery of Philip Bennion’s Death (1892/1897), a murder-mystery novel in which a work of art – a poisoned Renaissance cabinet – apparently kills its owner, a collector of curios: the dangers of art could hardly be more pressing. Marsh’s novel looks back on a century of writers who have associated fine art with crime, from De Quincey’s provocation that murder could be a fine art to Pater’s and Wilde’s interest in the aesthetics of transgression and the entertaining nature of murder. This chapter explores how Marsh's writing was at the heart of 1890s debates about collecting, aestheticism and decadence.