The Fictional Dimension of the School Shooting Discourse : : Approaching the Inexplicable / / Silke Braselmann.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter DG Plus DeG Package 2019 Part 1
• VerfasserIn: Braselmann, Silke,
• Place / Publishing House: Berlin ;, Boston : : De Gruyter, , [2019]; ©2019
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Series: Buchreihe der Anglia / Anglia Book Series , 65
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (XIV, 354 p.)

Ever since the 1990s, school shootings have shocked the public in their brutality, their suddenness, and their inexplicability. While film and literature have played a role in the heated debates about so-called copycat crimes, the growing body of fictionalizations of school shootings has been neglected thus far. However, in a discourse in which the boundaries between fiction and reality are increasingly blurred, this book shows how fiction shapes and structures, challenges and disrupts cultural processes of meaning-making. Hence, for a better understanding of the school shooting phenomenon, the relevance of fiction on all levels of discourse construction requires thorough analysis. This book therefore develops a new approach to the role of fiction for contemporary forms of excessive violence. By combining narrative theory with insights from sociology and other disciplines, it provides the means for apprehending and describing the relevance of fiction for contemporary discourses. Furthermore, it provides exemplary analyses of more specific functions of literary and filmic fictionalizations of school shootings between 2000 and 2016.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- 1. Introduction -- Part I: Narrative, Fiction and Fact in the School Shooting Discourse -- 2. We Need to Talk About Amok: Tracing the Narratives of School Shootings -- 3. Blurred Boundaries: The Role of Fiction in the School Shooting Discourse -- Part II: Discursive Functions of School Shooting Literature and Film -- 4. Multimodal Representations of the School Shooting Narrative in Give a Boy a Gun (2000), Shooter (2004) and Big Mouth & Ugly Girl (2002) -- 5. Experiencing the ‘Rashomon-Effect’: Functions of Multiperspectivity in Violent Ends (2015), This is Where It Ends (2016) and Elephant (2003) -- 6. Unsettling Narratives: The Inexplicability of School Shootings in We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003) and its Film Adaptation (2011) -- 7. Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index