Lunar Park Research Articles

The Rise of the Comics Künstlerroman, or, the Limits of Comics Acceptance: The Depiction of Comics Creators in the Work of Michael Chabon and Emily St. John Mandel

The kunstlerroman is a genre with a long and celebrated past. From Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park (2005) to John Irving’s The World According to Garp (1978) and Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift (1975), the genre has occupied a prominent place in bestseller lists and awards shortlists. The enduring popularity and continued critical celebration of the kunstlerroman makes it all the more striking that, since the turn of the millennium a new kind of author-protagonist has emerged — the graphic-novelist-protagonist. This move not only inducts graphic novelists into this existing — and prestigious — literary genre, it also draws them into the same struggle for recognition in which other novelist-protagonists have long been involved. Drawing on the recent examples of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), in this article I argue that there is a clear move toward the serious discussion of comics and comics creators in contemporary literature, an increasing willingness to talk about comics and their makers that is marked by a surprising faith in the fitness of comics as a mode of self-expression and a recognition of the clear kinship between prose authors and graphic novelists.

Transgression in the works of Bret Easton Ellis: the case of Imperial bedrooms

The paper argues that Imperial bedrooms, Bret Easton Ellis’s latest novel to date engages, among other things, with the author’s own fiction on manifold levels: it does not only mark his return to the minimalist mode of writing, but effectively reclaims narrative authority from cinematic adaptations of Ellis’s oeuvre, negotiates the terms of the fictional autobiographical pact set up by his previous novels, most notably Less than zero and Lunar park, and, finally, reinterprets and exposes, within the generic boundaries of the California noir teemed with existential(ist) issues, what Baudrillard called "the perfect crime” committed by contemporary media.

Lunar Park: From ashes to ashes

Abstract 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.

Writing the celebrity pseudo-autobiography: hauntings in Ellis and Ellroy

Pseudo-autobiography is an intriguing yet underexplored genre in literature and media. Combining both fictional and truthful elements, it subverts notions of what is expected in conventional autobiography by privileging the fictional over the truth. While conventional autobiography has proved to be a popular genre among stars and celebrity authors, certain authors have instead used the pseudo-autobiography as a method through which to deconstruct their mediated persona and manufacture their own sense of self. Bret Easton Ellis's ‘Lunar Park’ and James Ellroy's ‘The Hilliker Curse’ are both pseudo-autobiographies that purposefully disrupt the conventions of autobiography in an effort to undo the public's construction of their celebrity personas. Through the lens of pseudo-autobiography, an author is able to deliberately deceive and confuse the reader by utilizing both fact and fiction to create a hyperreal autobiographical narrative. This paper discusses, with reference to ideas of testimony, truth and the autobiographical pact, how the pseudo-autobiography proves more useful than conventional autobiography for celebrity authors whose personas have been manufactured in the media. More so than conventional autobiography, the pseudo-autobiography functions as a platform on which authors can construct their own hyperreal identity in an effort to undermine the public's creation of their identity.

Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park, and the Exquisite Corpse of Deficit Finance

Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park, and the Exquisite Corpse of Deficit Finance

Ghostly Generation Games: Multidirectional Hauntings and Self-Spectralization in Bret Easton Ellis's Lunar Park

This article analyzes the relationship between haunting, mourning and inheritance in Bret Easton Ellis's novel Lunar Park, with a specific focus on gender. Read in conjunction with Derrida's theory of spectrality and Abraham and Torok's concepts of the crypt and the phantom, Lunar Park is seen to transform the linear patriarchal economy of haunting featured in Specters of Marx by making haunting multidirectional and evoking the possibility of self-spectralization.

CUSTOMERS’ EMOTIONAL RESPONSES TO EMPLOYEES’ DISPLAYED POSITIVE EMOTIONS

The study sought to determine the customers’ emotional responses to employee displayed emotions at lunar parks in Zimbabwe. Hundred adult consumers were surveyed soon after an observation of the employee-consumer interaction. Employee emotional displays were measured using observational methods and customers’ emotional states were assessed using the PAD scale. Bivariate regression analysis was used to analyse data. The study revealed that employee displayed emotions positively influences customers’ emotional states of pleasure, arousal, and dominance. Unlike the findings from previous studies the dominance dimension was found to relevant to the lunar park services.

Repressive desublimation and the great refusal in Bret Easton Ellis's fiction

In 1968, Herbert Marcuse believed that a Great Refusal was possible, one that would ‘deny the exploitative power of corporate capitalism’. Marcuse's vision was never realised. This essay argues that society today is in an advanced state of that which the Frankfurt School termed ‘repressive desublimation’ and questions whether a liberationary praxis is still possible. It claims that Bret Easton Ellis's fiction choreographs an internalising of the forms of critique that marked 1968 and about which Marcuse writes. It is Ellis's act of double voicing that allows him to develop a duplicitous recalcitrant voice within the state of assimilation and it is double voicing which emerges as the key technique in Ellis's work that effects an ongoing critique in commodity society. Looking at Slavoj Žižek's recent revisionism of the notion of repressive desublimation, which connects Marxism and psychoanalysis, the essay considers how Ellis's novels, American Psycho, Glamorama and Lunar Park, function to address and reconfigure the relationship between the status of the Marxist fetishised object and the psychoanalytic phobic object in the present-day era of late capitalism. This essay seeks to illuminate how Ellis's fiction, through an involution of Marcuse's political theories, enacts a contemporary refusal from within the state of reification.

Bret Easton Ellis: American psycho, Glamorama, Lunar Park

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.

“Imperfectly Incarnate”: Father Absence, Law and Lies in Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park and John Burnside’s A Lie About My Father

Contemporary discussions emphasize crisis, fragmentation and reconstruction in the definition of the “new fatherhood.” In UK law, attempts to reinstate the “Name of the Father” into familial structures have appeared to shore up conventional family forms against the threat of dissolution. This article examines the difficulties of defining and describing legal and literary fatherhood through examination of two recent works, Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park and John Burnside’s A Lie About My Father. It suggests that the father of memory and imagination possesses qualities of falsehood and emptiness which mirror the intangibility and symbolic overburdening of the paternal signifier as theorized by Lacan and more recently Žižek. Thus, remembered fathers abuse, neglect, and crucially, lie to sons who long both for the presence of the human father and for the magic of the signifier. It then examines the authors’ strategies for forgiveness of their fathers and their attempts to reconcile the liar with the lying signifier, discussing ways in which imagining the father as embodied individual aid in the rehabilitation of the paternal signifier itself, with implications for sociolegal conceptions of fathers and fatherhood.

The Fleeting “9/11 Effect” in The Good Life and Lunar Park

In this sense, novels like The Good Life and Lunar Park reflect in miniature several aspects of the relationship our country has developed to 9/1 1. As devastating and important an event as 9/11 was, the posttraumatic moments of enlightened unity were fleeting and the inspiration to draw upon our nation’s better impulses devolved quickly into short-sighted, even self-destructive, policies.

The horror of inheritance: poisonous lineage in Bret Easton Ellis' Lunar Park

Lunar Park presents the reader with a revisiting of the classic themes of Shakespeare's Hamlet. In this text, the son is presented with the spectre of the father after he has ignored the wishes outlined in his last Will and Testament. Ellis deliberately alludes to issues inherent to the gothic the invalid Will; the castle; themes of inheritance manufacturing a textual space that is repeatedly disturbed. Through the return of the father and the dislocation of linearity, the notion of fatherson inheritance becomes impossible. Through the recurrent emblem of poison in Hamlet, inheritance can be understood as an experience of horror relating to Derrida's pharmakon: as both poison and cure, this signifier highlights the flaws of a tradition based on linearity and oppositional terms. Horror is initiated through a lack of meaning, an uncertainty that shakes the foundations of authoritative structures such as history, patriarchy and the law. Reminiscent of the inherited bloodline passed from father to son, the pharmakon disturbs the very tradition it attempts to reaffirm. In Lunar Park, as in Hamlet, the protagonist must submit to the word of the father, an action that results in illegality and chaos, questioning further the tradition of authoritative patriarchy. The poisonous effects of the father result in a time that is out of joint: an impossible experience that halts further inheritance of such a venomous bloodline.

Closure through Mock-Disclosure in Bret Easton Ellis’s <em>Lunar Park</em>

Closure through Mock-Disclosure in Bret Easton Ellis’s <em>Lunar Park</em>

Negotiating Selves: Exploring Cultures of Disclosure

If identity is a construct—and, more critically, a construct defined and developed through relationships with others in public and private spheres—then an understanding of the processes, mechanisms and platforms by which individuals disclose information about themselves is crucial in understanding the way identity, community and culture function, and the way individuals can intervene in the functioning of culture.

The (Neuro)-Aesthetics of Caricature: Representations of Reality in Bret Easton Ellis'sLunar Park

Recent research by V. S. Ramachandran and Semir Zeki has used neuroscientific methods to investigate the nature of aesthetic response. By situating their work in the context of post-Kantian aesthetic discourse, this essay demonstrates that such research provides an opportunity to bridge cognitive and artistic approaches to aesthetic experience and offers a provisional theory of art that incorporates both empirical and philosophical traditions. These theories will be considered in relation to Bret Easton Ellis's recent novel Lunar Park (2005), which focuses explicitly on questions of representation and reality. Through a juxtaposition of Ramachandran's emphasis on caricature as a central principle of art and Ellis's focus on distorted and questionable realities, this essay suggests new possibilities for the integration of cognitive science with literary and philosophical criticism.

Copycat: Duplication and Creation in American Psycho and Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis

As the hypotext of Lunar Park (2005), American Psycho (1991) provides many interpretative keys to Bret Easton Ellis’s pseudo autobiographical work. In harmony with the playful spirit of postmodernism, the diegetic author behaves like the conjurers who disclose the tricks of their trade without destroying the essence of their magic. His universe is greatly identical to that of his fiction and the summaries of his preceding books duplicate the same text, thereby questioning the nature of creation. This paper starts by bringing to light Ellis’s conjuring tricks, before considering the relevance of a commodified persona in the context of a fin de siecle dominated by the emblematic figure of the yuppie as a grotesque dandy. The last part uses the final image of American Psycho and its transparent reference to one of Magritte’s most famous paintings in order to draw a parallel between Ellis’s creative process and the painter’s.

The Real Filth in American Psycho

The Real Filth in American Psycho