Fiction As a Conversation Lee, Susan Savage
Hungarian journal of English and American studies,
06/2023, Volume:
29, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
David Foster Wallace and Bret Easton Ellis are known for their contributions to postmodern literature; however, they also developed a contentious relationship outside of their literary works. But ...what caused this conflict between the two writers? Although they were often in competition with one another as literary contemporaries who both explored postmodernism, the real issue between the two writers is the difference in how they envisioned and portrayed a postmodern world. While both Wallace and Ellis utilize irony, examine collectivist identities, and critique equality in the West, they do so with a different endgame in mind—namely, Wallace’s idea that the postmodern world encourages a deeper look into notions of selfhood that extend beyond Ellis’s cynical emphasis on surface and superficiality. A comparative approach of “Girl With Curious Hair” (1989) and American Psycho (1991) offers fresh perspectives on how Wallace and Ellis utilized similar themes to contrast their different points of view regarding the postmodern world.
El objetivo de este trabajo es proponer la existencia de una relación transtextual de hipertextualidad entre Shame (2011), película dirigida por el director británico Steve McQueen, y American Psycho ...de Mary Harron (2000), adaptación cinematográfica de la novela homónima de Bret Easton Ellis (1991). El fundamento de esta hipótesis descansa tanto en la similitud de los respectivos argumentos y de los recursos cinematográficos (estructurales, transtextuales y retóricos) empleados en las dos películas, como en la intención artística de los cineastas. En un trabajo subsiguiente, se identificará y analizará una serie de citas intertextuales de diferente procedencia también presentes en el filme de McQueen. La superposición de diferentes discursos convierte a Shame en un rico palimpsesto transtextual que proyecta su propio significado a partir de la suma de las significaciones de sus textos subyacentes. Parafraseando la fórmula del semiólogo literario francés Gérard Genette, cuya metodología ha servido de base para el análisis, Shame de Steve McQueen resulta un buen testimonio de “cine en segundo grado”.
This collection of critical essays on the American novelist Bret Easton Ellis examines the novels of his mature period: American Psycho (1991), Glamorama (1999), and Lunar Park (2005). Taking as its ...starting-point American Psycho's seismic impact on contemporary literature and culture, the volume establishes Ellis' centrality to the scholarship and teaching of contemporary American literature in the U.S. and in Europe. Contributors examine the alchemy of acclaim and disdain that accrues to this controversial writer, provide an overview of growing critical material on Ellis and review the literary and artistic significance of his recent work. Exploring key issues including violence, literature, reality, reading, identity, genre, and gender, the contributors together provide a critical re-evaluation of Ellis, exploring how he has impacted, challenged, and transformed contemporary literature in the U.S. and abroad.
Abstract
Fifty Shades of Grey (FSOG) is argued to be a female-focused mainstream cult film that deliberately fosters a simultaneity of viewing modes. This multiple address highlights how the lauded ...qualities of cult texts are standard in feminine narratives that need to appeal to a large cross section of women. Cult discourse still depends on misogyny and masculinized distinction even when the mainstream mode seems to break down gendered fandom. Contradictions emerge because cult was traditionally defined against the mindless consuming of women. However, the cultish consumption patterns for FSOG are deliberately fostered by merchandising strategies. Thus, the same element that shows cult tendencies is used to denigrate the film as the antithesis of cult: women as consumers.
Lunar Park: From ashes to ashes Loewy, Monika
European journal of American culture,
09/2014, Volume:
33, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Lunar Park opens with a sentence repeated from a previous novel: he states, 'You do an awfully good impression of yourself', thus setting the satirical and deceptive tone of the text. In this ...article, I will focus on two themes implicit in this sentence: that Lunar Park
tracks Bret Easton Ellis's search for his true identity and past and that this is impossible. I suggest that it is this inability to know an author, text or oneself within the context of a nation founded upon illusory ideals and their underlying fragmentation on which this book is centred.Ellis's
semi-autobiography playfully describes America's cultural and physical landscape as being ruptured and repressed, emphasizing the way this context has structured his own life. The novel chronicles the author's fame and family and takes place in a suburban town outside New York
City, which is under the threat of terrorist acts in a post-9/11 America. Here, the fictional character Patrick Bateman from Ellis's previous novel American Psycho begins to haunt Ellis's home. Since American Psycho is renowned for its critique of the American dream, in Lunar Park,
Bateman can be seen as allegorizing a romanticized identity that disavows imperialism, a notion central to American Exceptionalism. It is this, I suggest, that haunts Ellis throughout the Lunar Park.In this article, I will discuss how Lunar Park embodies Ellis's movement towards
avowal, towards recognizing those fantasies that have structured Americans' reactions to trauma, specifically 9/11. By fabricating the past, Ellis gestures towards the impossibility of ever remembering it, as based upon his identity and book having been formed through a meaningless world
where 'publishing a shiny booklike object was simply an excuse for parties and glamour' (Ellis 2005: 9). In so doing, I suggest that the text also invites the reader to 'enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction' (Baudrillard 2010: 29) in order to break
down their own illusions. Lunar Park thus materializes the falling monument it represents, exposing post-9/11 America as catastrophic while revealing its own erasure. This article will trace Ellis's frustrated search to find and illuminate his identity as an American and author in an
idea of the New World.
Through a comparison of Caio Fernando Abreu's Onde andará Dulce Veiga? and Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, this article argues that a reconsideration of popular culture and its relationship with ...postmodernism needs to be addressed. By using Baudrillard's concept of simulation to undermine commonly held views about postmodern madness, one encounters a more complex understanding of how, and why, characters are constantly searching for a cure.
American Psycho's alternating rhythms of repetition incite intense uncertainty, emptying its violence of meaning and culpability while compelling "nameless" dread and desire. We read in suspense of ...epistemologically and ethically suspended horror and thus, confront violence qua violence, unmitigated and inexplicable. Reading this "stark fiction" reads us; it affords ethical self-reflection in the play of dreadful desire for a flat, vivid violence that only signifies as we each activate it.
For François Roche, the pastoral can threaten a phony eco‐friendly dualism: ‘It seems that our times have invited the two demons to the same cosy dinner party, thus provoking a divorce between the ...next door and the door after that ‐ a permanent schizophrenia.’ His research project, An Architecture ‘des humeurs’, thus seeks ‘to confront the unknown in a contradictory manner’.
Masculinity in Contemporary New York Fiction is an interdisciplinary study that presents masculinity as a key thematic concern in contemporary New York fiction. This study argues that New York ...authors do not simply depict masculinity as a social and historical construction but seek to challenge the archetypal ideals of masculinity by writing counter-hegemonic narratives.
Gendering canonical New York writers, namely Paul Auster, Bret Easton Ellis, and Don DeLillo, illustrates how explorations of masculinity are tied into the principal themes that have defined the American novel from its very beginning. The themes that feature in this study include the role of the novel in American society; the individual and (urban) society; the journey from innocence to awareness (of masculinity); the archetypal image of the absent and/or patriarchal father; the impact of homosocial relations on the everyday performance of masculinity; male sexuality; and the male individual and globalization.
What connects these contemporary New York writers is their employment of the one of the great figures in the history of literature: the flâneur. These authors take the flâneur from the shadows of the Manhattan streets and elevate this figure to the role of self-reflexive agent of male subjectivity through which they write counter-hegemonic narratives of masculinity. This book is an essential reference for those with an interest in gender studies and contemporary American fiction.
Lost Angels Lebeau, Vicky
1995, 20050629, 1994, 2005-06-29
eBook
Re-reading Freud's writing on femininity, fantasy and social identification, Lost Angels expands the psychoanalytic framework within which contemporary debates regarding fantasy and spectatorship ...have been taking place.
Vicky Lebeau takes Freud's preoccupation with femininity and feminine fantasy as her starting point and goes on to explore his differentiation between masculine and feminine forms of fantasy through feminist and critical theories of spectatorship and cinema.
Investigating how psychoanalysis explains fantasy as a form of preoccupation which cuts across both 'private' and 'public' forms of fantasy, Lebeau links discussion of the female spectator with the so-called 'malaise' of today's mass culture through her close readings of three key 'youth' films of the 1980's - John Hughes' Ferris Bueller's Day Off , Francis Coppola's Rumble Fish and Tim Hunter's River's Edge .
Lost Angels is a ground-breading addition to current feminist film theory and essential reading for all students of film.
Vicky Lebeau has published widely in the fields of psychoanalysis and visual culture. She has particular interests in the topics of sexuality, fantasy and representation.
In psychoanalysis, she has particular interests in Freud, Winnicott, Andre Green, Jean Laplanche, Serge Leclaire, Michael Eigen, Joyce McDougall and Christopher Bollas; interests in 19th and 20th century writers and film-makers include George Eliot, Doris Lessing, Elfriede Jelinek, Michael Haneke.
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