Content area
Full Text
ABSTRACT
The purpose of this article is to advance an appreciative critique of Rafe McGregor's, A Criminology of Narrative Fiction, and to raise some general issues about the intersection of criminology and fiction that have not been adequately dealt with within criminology. The overall argument is that the value of narrative fiction for criminology lies with the allegorical and counter-factual role it might play.
KEY WORDS
narrative fiction, allegory, folk concept, signification, interpretation, explanation, counter-factual
Novelists - whose serious work embodies the most widespread definitions of human reality - frequently possess this [sociological] imagination and do much to meet the demand for it. ... In the absence of an adequate social science, critics and novelists, dramatists and poets have been the major, and often the only, formulators of private troubles and even of public issues. Art does express such feelings and often focuses them - at its best with dramatic sharpness - but still not with the intellectual clarity required for their understanding or relief today.
(C. Wright Mills, 1959a: 14, 18)
Introduction
In 1980, criminologist Edward Sagarin argued literature was a significant source of insight into the human condition. The point made was that criminology could be greatly enriched by the literary world but that criminologists hadn't understood this even though "literary intellectuals" and social scientists often examined the same phenomena.
Scientific 'grammars' of action do not have a monopoly on meaningfulness and coherence, and a retreat into them as the sole means of understanding, discussing, and coping with crime would be disastrous because, among other things, the scientific enterprise would lose its breadth should it deprive itself of opportunities to cross-fertilize with art and humanism (Sagarin 1980: 87).
In 1991 criminologist Robert Kelly highlighted the important role literature played in humanising criminology, particularly a criminology that championed cold, detached observation. Kelly's intervention followed Frank Williams (1984) lamenting the "demise of the criminological imagination" due to scientistic imperialism. Kelly argued literature could illuminate the often intricate and complex relations between psychological dynamics, social action, and structural features of social life. As did Sagarin, Kelly argued for the cross-fertilisation of literary studies and criminology as each could enrich the others, avowing literature would likely have the greater impact. "Literature," Kelly (1991: 58) argued, "is...