«Человек одержимый»: природа зла и отчуждения в романах Х. Селби «Бес» и Б. И. Эллиса «Американский психопат»

The Real Filth in American Psycho

No Uncertain Terms

Women have always been an important part of literature, no matter how were they presented. They are key characters in the development of the plots in works of all literary periods and literary movements. They are presented as victims, villains, weak, strong, intelligent, and sacrificing. This paper will bring a comparative outlook how women are presented in Bloody Chamber and American Psycho. Both Carter in Bloody Chamber and Ellis in American Psycho have women as main protagonists, and no matter these works belong to the postmodernist period, the images of women have a lot of traces from the earliest times. It means, we see women as victims of patriarchal society and families, we see them as sexually submissive and undervalued gender. They try to point out if these women are able to do something to change the way their actions and behavior are judged and how the society views them. This paper gives a comparative outline of these famous literary works, presenting a part of English and American Literature. This is what is presented in this paper, hoping that it will give a glimpse of not only women, their role and position in the society, but the whole society as well, presented in British and American literature.

When I Met Kathy Acker

The American Dream has been affecting the writing manner of numerous (trans)American authors ever since the time of colonization. This paper consults multiple definitions of the American Dream and/or the American Nightmare, the notions often intertwined with each other. Further, the paper consults with transnational American literature to represent the American Dream of U.S. (im/trans)migrant authors. The main purpose of this paper is to scrutinize the American Dream in Bret Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho and Jeanine Cummins’ (trans)novel American Dirt, and to discuss the ways in which the American Dream is being reversed – transformed into its antithetical (American) Nightmare.

F. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) exerted a considerable influence on American literature since 1940s. In contrast with 1920s–30s when its reception and impact used to be somewhat blurred and undistinguishable from “Dostoevsky complex” in toto, in the postwar period it was read and interpreted against the existentialist background that actually defined the reception of Dostoevsky’s novella in the United States and stimulated writers’ and readers’ interest in this text that became classical and canonical for American writers in the second half of the XXth–XXIst centuries. “Underground man” as an important literary archetype found its way into postwar American culture. The works by outstanding authors beginning with Saul Bellow (Dangling Man, 1944), Richard Wright (The Man Who Lived Underground, 1945), Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man, 1952), Jack Kerouac, Jerome Salinger and up to Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho, 1991), Percy Walker, David Foster Wallace, show a persistent fascination of American writers with the novella and are based on re-reading and re-interpreting Dostoevsky’s ideas, motives and imagery.

F. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) exerted a considerable influence on American literature since 1940s. The works by outstanding authors beginning with Saul Bellow (Dangling Man, 1944) or Jerome Salinger’s prose and up to Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho, 1991), Percy Walker, David Foster Wallace, show a persistent fascination of American writers with the novella and are based on re-reading and re-interpreting Dostoevsky’s ideas, motives and imagery.

Reviewed by: Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction by Liesbeth Korthals Altes Jan Alber (bio) Liesbeth Korthals Altes. Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 2014. xvi + 325 pp. Some critics read Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) as a biting satire on Reaganomics and the consumerism in the United States of the 1980s, whereas others see it as a perverse misogynist orgy of violence and bloodshed. In such a case, Liesbeth Korthals Altes would ask the respective readers to actively reflect upon the factors through which they attribute different meanings to the same narrative texts and to explore diversity in interpretation. She argues that this kind of exercise does not only increase our critical self-awareness; it also stimulates our capacity for perspective taking and the ability to empathize with others. Generally speaking, Korthals Altes seeks to reconceptualize narratology as a metahermeneutic endeavor that she places on the overlap between hermeneutics (the domain of reasoning about value-laden interpretive pathways) and cognitive approaches (based on the idea that recipients use memorized mental models to make meaning). In contrast to structuralist purists, she states that narratology should involve interpretation as both “a task for which it develops heuristic tools” and “as an object of study” (50). Her self-reflexive research program seeks to relate “interpretive argumentations to their underlying value-laden conceptions and pathways” (99). More specifically, Korthals Altes investigates the process of interpretation by zooming in on the dialectical relationship between narrative features and the ethos (or self image) we attribute to characters, narrators, and authors (such as the genius, prophet, guide, social critic, enfant terrible, nihilist, outcast, lunatic, pervert, or impostor). For her, these ethos attributions are “part of the more general issue of how people make meaning from and with texts” (19). Korthals Altes sees various transversal echoes between the knowledge-based empathic engagement posited by hermeneutic thinkers (such as Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and Gadamer), and cognitive inferences that involve frames, scripts, schemata, mental models, and prototypes (39, 49). Concepts such as posture and ethos, for instance, are mental models along which individuals conceptualize themselves and are classified by others. Cognitive research can thus “help explain how we share experiential knowledge about the world and interpretations of human experience through narratives [. . .], and why that is so important for a culture” (49). [End Page 365] Korthals Altes does not only argue that narratologists should reinstate the extra-textual author and the actual reader into their analyses; she also discusses other framing devices that play a role with regard to our interpretations. One example is Maingueneau’s distinction between the narrative’s status as fiction or nonfiction, genre conventions, and the concrete communicative situation evoked by the text (69–70). Also, literary critics resort to the different value regimes developed by Boltanski and Thévenot: the Inspired World of the arts (where creativity and originality are considered to be important), the Domestic World (dominated by respect for tradition, mutual love, and support), the World of Opinion (which values fame), the Civic World (where responsibility, justice, and the common good are upheld), the Industrial World (dominated by efficiency, zeal, and technical skills), and the World of Commerce (which values rentability) (74). In addition, Korthals Altes discusses narratological tools that specifically concern the analysis of characters, narrators, and authors. For example, she redeploys Phelan’s three ways of reading characters (mimetic, thematic, and synthetic) as interpretive strategies that depend on how readers frame the narrative in question (132–33), and she shows that Schneider’s distinction between “categorized” (flat) and “personalized” (round) characters offers argumentative pathways to explain the analyst’s interpretation (138–39). Korthals Altes also shows how readers attribute an ethos to personalized narrators (as in Stanzel’s first-person and the authorial narrative situation) or to less personalized narration (as in the figural narrative situation or cases of camera-eye narration) or how they equate the narrator or narration with the author. She argues that Walsh’s proposal to replace all extradiegetic heterodiegetic narrators with authors is overly hasty: for her, there might be interpretive reasons why a critic might want to posit an...

Reviewed by: Lyrical Strategies: The Poetics of the Twentieth-Century American Novel by Katie Owens-Murphy Elissa Zellinger OWENS-MURPHY, KATIE. Lyrical Strategies: The Poetics of the Twentieth-Century American Novel. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018. 240 pp. $99.95 hardcover; $34.95 paper; $34.95 e-book. Our understanding of the American novel is poorer for our adherence to narrative theory, or so Katie Owens-Murphy argues in Lyrical Strategies: The Poetics of the Twentieth-Century American Novel. Indeed, the strictures of such theory have caused us to overlook rich generic interrelations. Critical attention to "lyricality," she contends, offers more dynamic interpretations of language and structure and, in so doing, enables "a more complete understanding of the twentieth-century American novel" (xii). In addition, this call for lyricality helps to dismantle outmoded generic barriers—barriers that ignore how "many of our most acclaimed American novels from the last century contain ontological ambiguities that undermine the traditional staples of narrative fiction" (xi). Since the conventions of narrative theory inadequately account for such ambiguities, Owens-Murphy enlists the "key tropes" (xi) of lyric—"repetition, polysyndeton, metaphor, dramatic [End Page 453] personae, and exclusive address" (xi)—as tools for providing insight into the formal maneuvers of American novels. Owens-Murphy grounds her suspicions regarding genre and theories of genre in the practices and habits of canonical twentieth-century writers. A brief "Preface" and first chapter, "Genres in Contest," outline the argument that the generic distinctions typically recognized by twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary critics—lyric, narrative, and drama—are pitted in unproductive competition with each other. Most twentieth-century writers, however, do not uphold these genre-based antagonisms. Owens-Murphy calls for scholars to re-discover "important interconnections among literary kinds" (4) by considering the lyrical practices at work in these novels. The remaining chapters in Lyrical Strategies aim to illustrate what we've been overlooking. Owens-Murphy's chapters are organized according to the lyrical tropes listed above and cover a remarkable range of twentieth-century novels. She excels at explicating novels with a reputation for difficulty. For instance, Chapter 2, "Repetition and Insistence," applies "repetition's role(s) in the lyric tradition" to works by Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, John Dos Passos, and Kathy Acker. Instead of the "progress, sequence, and succession" usually found in narrative, these authors, Owens-Murphy suggests, use lyrical repetition in order to "forc[e] the reader to look backward nearly as often as she looks forward" (44). Owens-Murphy elaborates on similar recursive reading techniques in Chapter 3, "Rhythm and Insubordination." Here she discusses polysyndeton, "the purposeful repetition of coordinating conjunctions" (47), in novels by Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Don DeLillo, and Cormac McCarthy. By flattening the hierarchy of syntax in narrative, this poetic technique draws our attention to "lateral systems of interconnectivity" (55) within these texts. Owens-Murphy's next three chapters focus on broader poetic tropes. Chapter 4 discusses novels in which metaphor drives the plot; in works by Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison, among others, the preeminence of metaphor results, Owens-Murphy concludes, in narratives that focus on "reflection rather than action" (86). Chapter 5 explores how the Victorian dramatic monologue creates unstable narrators in twentieth-century novels such as Henry James's The Turn of the Screw and Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho. While providing innovative approaches to well-known texts, these last two chapters perhaps too easily ignore the ubiquity of techniques such as metaphor and too easily collapse the differences between different verse genres. These poetic techniques do not strike me as specifically lyrical: after all, all types of poetry (and prose for that matter) contain metaphor; and while dramatic monologue may have its "lyrical" moments, it is its own verse genre. Owens-Murphy returns to the conventions traditionally associated with lyric in her final chapter's discussion of the "overheard" poetic speaker. By positioning readers as "eavesdroppers" to the lyrical expression of emotions, novels such as Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint ask readers to "negotiate positions for ourselves at the margins of these confessional texts" (158). This negotiation has salutary effects, as readers potentially "suspend judgment for the sake of compassion" (185). A...

Horrific Humor and the Moment of Droll Grimness in Cinema: Sidesplitting sLaughter

<i>Cultural Capital</i>: Reflections from a Latin Americanist

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.

This chapter situates the American gothic in post-1960 cinema and TV by exploring the distinctly American lineage of the modern serial killer. Landmark films chart seismic shifts in post-classical American cinema after the success of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1973) to The Silence of the Lambs (1991), American Psycho (2000), and Dexter (2006-13). This Drawing upon the influence of real/reel American serial killers (Ed Gein, Ted Bundy), this chapter argues that the serial killer embodies the counter-narrative American Dream: the consumerist and consumption-driven American nightmare.

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.

&lt;p&gt;This study examines the dynamics of post-war American serial killer fiction as it relates to social and literary contexts. In the context of history and development, this study considers the impact and origins of particular works and how they have influenced the stylistic and thematic evolution of a particular subgenre I have called literary serial killer fiction. Emphasis is placed on select narratives that directly (or indirectly) transform, challenge and critique the genre conventions in which they are written. Of interest is the evolution of general serial killer fiction as a postmodern phenomenon, in terms of its popularity with the reading public, and in line with the growth of media interest in representations of serial killers. I draw on literary theory (in particular, ‘new historicism’) to demonstrate that the appeal and tropes of serial killer fiction reflect socio-political interests indicative of the era from where they were produced, and to show how the subgenre of literary serial killer fiction can be categorized using its own particular set of defining features. I examine these aspects in detail in relation to the following selection of fictional serial-killer narratives: Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, James Ellroy’s Killer on the Road, and Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. For brevity’s sake, I have selected American narrative works that employ first-person narration and are transgressive in the way they focus on characters who defy convention and push boundaries, as do the narratives within larger genre traditions and protocols. In my view, these works are the purest examples of literary serial killer fiction in that they are characteristically unlike other examples that can easily be categorised under other literary genres. The appeal and popularity of the genre, alongside the functional aspects of the trope, leads me to conclude that it is an ideal form to interact with popular cultural narratives, while also allowing subversive interplay between both real and fictional concerns. The appeal of the genre to those authors who usually write outside of it, particularly in regard to its transgressive and allegorical qualities, is also of particular interest to this study. Because of the hybrid nature of the genre and the ease with which the central trope of the fictional serial killer transcends genres, the resulting possibilities provide a transgressive outlet for authors who wish to test boundaries, in both a literary and an ontological sense, in regard to the commentary serial killer fiction allows on the state of contemporary American literature and society.&lt;/p&gt;