Critical criminological method

In Chapter One, I introduced my argument for a new methodology for critical criminology with a rationale, literature review, and extended abstract. The rationale drew attention to the extent to which most literary criticism and much critical criminology has little impact on social reality and to my conviction of the need to change this situation. The literature review presented a summary of the only three sustained criminological engagements with fiction to date: Vincenzo Ruggiero's (2003) Crime in Literature: Sociology of Deviance and Fiction, Jon Frauley's (2010) Criminology, Deviance, and the Silver Screen: The Fictional Reality and the Criminological Imagination, and my own (McGregor 2021a) A Criminology of Narrative Fiction. I characterised the remainder of the book as introducing criminological criticism as a method, providing three examples of criminological criticism in practice, and then expanding the method into an interdisciplinary methodology.

Chapter Two started with a definition of a complex narrative as the product of an agent that is high in narrativity in virtue of representing one or more agents and two or more events which are causally connected, thematically unified, and conclude. I then presented Fredric Jameson's (2019) model of fourfold allegory in which the literal, symbolic, existential, and anthropic meanings interact such that the meaning of the work taken as a whole is more than the sum of the meanings of its representational levels. Fourfold allegories are also complex narratives and the levels of allegorical meaning correspond with the four philosophical values attributed to narrativity: aesthetic, cognitive, ethical, and political. In consequence, the practices of the interpretation of meaning and the appreciation of value are mutually complementary. Both of these practices can be applied to both the representational and extra-representational capacities of the work and are constituent elements of criminological criticism, which is the employment of allegories for the purpose of explaining the causes of harm and social injustice with the intention to contribute to the reduction of that harm and social injustice.

The purpose of Chapter Three was to practise criminological criticism on George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) in order to disclose the feature film's insight into the causes of the harms associated with sexism.