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Serial Killers: Death and Life in America's Wound Culture. Mark Seltzer. New York: Routledge, 1998.
In Reading for the Plot, Peter Brooks identifies "ambition" as one of the driving forces of narrative. The self, Brooks writes, "creates a circle,...mainly in front of itself, attempting ever to move forward to the circumference of that circle and to widen it, to cast the nets of the self ever further" (40). Considering that Brooks thinks of plot as a combination of repetition and variation, driven by complex and intense desires, it would be appropriate, in more than one way, to think of Mark Seltzer's new book, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America's Wound Culture, as ambitious. With great sophistication and virtuosity, Seltzer's study of popular culture widens the circle of inquiry on the subject of serial murder-theoretically, historically, and rhetorically.
First, Seltzer's ambition is to capture contemporary culture as a vast and complex system, structured by ideologies that often fragment into impossible oppositions and maddening ambiguities. Obviously, this project requires a wide range of reference points, the most crucial and typical of which are the figure of the serial killer and the spectacle of serial murder. "Serial killing," Seltzer writes, "has its place in a culture in which addictive violence has become a collective spectacle, one of the crucial sites where private desire and public fantasy cross" (253). As prominently as the serial killer might figure in the book's title, he is but a specific symptom of the general breakdown of boundaries, albeit...