Caviar and Friendship: Sensational Trials and the Reinvention of Public Space

Main Article Content

Nicola Evans

Abstract

Sensational trials are a venue for the performance of social knowledge—the kind of knowledge that does not regularly make an appearance on the front pages of national newspapers. if sensational trials routinely catapult private matters into the public sphere, it is less such exciting revelations that concern me here, than the dross kicked up in their wake. Sensational trials, I contend, are a point of entry into everyday life, that far more elusive zone of ordinary beliefs and practices situated between the institution and the bedroom, in the interstices of the scripted and chronicled domains of private and public life. To address the everyday is to confront those undocumented procedures and forms of knowledge that exist beyond the realm of official discourse, practices that cultural theorists are increasingly eager to explore and increasingly sceptical of finding. As Barry Sandywell recently observed, ‘Like the omnipollent term “community”, “everyday life” is in continuous use within lay and theoretical discourse and yet continuously evades definition. Perhaps ... we should ask “where is everyday life”?’ This paper argues that one answer to this question lies in the study of sensational trials.

Article Details

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Articles (Peer Reviewed)
Author Biography

Nicola Evans, University of Wollongong

NICOLA EVANS is a lecturer in media and cultural studies at the University of Wollongong. She has published essays on cinema, literature and identity in Screen, Discourse, Quarterly Journal of Speech and Text and Performance Quarterly. She is currently working on the aesthetics of violence and suffering in contemporary cinema.