Download or read book Violence and Perversity in American Psycho written by Polina Choparinova and published by . This book was released on 2013-07 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, printed single-sided, grade: 1,7, University of Mannheim, language: English, abstract: Bret Easton Ellis American Psycho has been a highly controversial book. The novel is a first person narrative describing episodes in the life of a wealthy young Mannhattanite and self- proclaimed serial killer. The author tries to reproduce the culture in the 1980s, which embodies the decade and all the cliches of the decade in the West- the manic consumer overdrive, exhaustion, wipe-out, terror, relentless aggression, violence and perversity. That is the main reason why many critics condemned this novel before it had been published so Ellis even had to search for a new publishing company. Even the publishers, Simon and Schuster, of his first two novels Less than zero and The Rules of Attraction decided to terminate his contract (Annesley 1998). The explicit and detailed description of violence in this book was the reason for the reaction of the critics in that way. It is not necessary to say that all these controversies made on one hand American Psycho Ellis's most successful book and on the other hand guaranteed him a place in the history of American literature. In this paper, I will study the Patrick Bateman's personality and the contrast between the public person Patrick Bateman and his alter ego. This aims to show the reasons and motives for his behavior and at the same time will help to create a picture of social phenomena in the USA of the 80s as they are described in the novel, in order to provide the settings, the atmosphere in which the violence takes place. This will help to give an opinion of this violence and perversity and to interpret them. In this chapter I want to give a short interpretation of American Psycho based on the previous insights and I am going to study how violence is presented in the text. At the end of my term paper I would like to give a brief info

Download or read book Strange Narrators in Contemporary Fiction written by Marco Caracciolo and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Spiders on Drugs: A Prologue -- Introduction: Minding Characters -- 1 Patterns of Cognitive Dissonance -- 2 Two Child Narrators -- 3 Madness between Violence and Insight -- 4 A Strange Mood -- 5 Tales of Rats and Pigs -- 6 Obsessive Narrators, Unstable Knowledge -- Coda: Uses of the Character- Centered Illusion -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index

Download or read book American Psycho written by Bret Easton Ellis and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-12-15 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cult classic, adapted into a film starring Christian Bale. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? Patrick Bateman has it all: good looks, youth, charm, a job on Wall Street, reservations at every new restaurant in town and a line of girls around the block. He is also a psychopath. A man addicted to his superficial, perfect life, he pulls us into a dark underworld where the American Dream becomes a nightmare . . . With an introduction by Irvine Welsh, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho is one of the most controversial and talked-about novels of all time. A multi-million-copy bestseller hailed as a modern classic, it is a violent black comedy about the darkest side of human nature.

Download or read book Perverse Spectators written by Janet Staiger and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2000-07 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thesis of this collection of a dozen essays written by Staiger (communication, U. of Texas-Austin) since Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema (1992) is that contextual factors more than textual ones account for viewers' "perverse" (i.e., negotiated) experience of films. The essays are organized by the themes of historical theory and reception studies, interpretation and Hollywood film history, interpretation and identity theory, and interpretation and representation of the real. Featured films are A Clockwork Orange,The Silence of the Lambs, and The Return of Martin Guerre. c. Book News Inc.

Download or read book Bret Easton Ellis s American Psycho written by Julian Murphet and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2002-01-11 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is part of a new series of guides to contemporary novels. The aim of the series is to give readers accessible and informative introductions to some of the most popular, most acclaimed and most influential novels of recent years - from 'The Remains of the Day' to 'White Teeth'. A team of contemporary fiction scholars from both sides of the Atlantic has been assembled to provide a thorough and readable analysis of each of the novels in question.

Download or read book Psychoanalytic Understanding of Violence and Suicide written by Rosine Jozef Perelberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-10-18 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perelberg is well known and respected psycotherapist and is associate editor of the NLP Very little has been written on violence, as opposed to aggression and very little clinical material has been published on violent patients. Very distinguished list of contributors

Download or read book Errancies of Desire written by Vartan P. Messier and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-15 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social commentators, psychologists, and journalists all point to the idea that in the new millennium, traditional masculinity is in crisis. In contemporary film and literature, this predicament is often portrayed as a problem of desire—particularly, heterosexual desire. Male libido, it appears, is especially vicious when it is misguided. Yet the genesis of this problem is not consistently diagnosed. While some texts may situate it in the unbridled expression of human sexuality and its associated discourses, others contend it is the perverse result of popular constructions of sex and gender. Addressing this conundrum, Errancies of Desire focuses on the intersections of phallocratic violence and masculine identity in contemporary works of fiction across three subcontinents: North America, Western Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa. In doing so, Messier details the ways in which male desire is predicated on mediated forms of predatory and misogynistic sexuality that cross national and cultural divides. Employing a comparative methodology, he interrogates common perceptions of national differences and masculine identities grounded in historical specificity. Errancies of Desire effectively argues that when associated symptoms of violent and sexist behavior are institutionalized and misguidedly construed as a masculine norm, all men can become monsters.

Download or read book Psychoanalysis Violence and Rage Type Murder written by Duncan Cartwright and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-05-22 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What turns an apparently 'normal' individual into a killer? Many people who commit "rage type" murders have no history of violence. Using psychoanalytic theory and a number of case studies, this book isolates key psychological factors that appear to help explain why such acts of extreme violence occur. Starting from a psychoanalytic standpoint, Psychoanalysis, Violence and Rage-Type Murder argues for a pluralistic approach to understanding aggression, and claims that the origins of aggression have no single source or cause. Drawing broadly on psychological, criminological and psychoanalytic research the author outlines the clinical features of the act and explores the possible role that psychopathology and personality might play in the build up to murder. These observations raise a number of questions about the so-called 'normality' of the individual alongside the capacity to commit murder, and how we might understand the stability of such offenders. Psychoanalysis, Violence and Rage-Type Murder will be of great interest to psychotherapists, forensic psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, psychologists, criminologists and health care workers.

Download or read book Dark Thoughts written by Steven Jay Schneider and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is horror a fundamentally nihilistic genre? Why are those of us who enjoy horror films so attracted to watching things on screen that in real life we would almost certainly find repellent? Do monster movies have a deleterious moral effect on their viewers? In seeking to answer such questions, as well as a host of related ones, Dark Thoughts reveals that our fascination with horror cinema, and the pleasure we take in it, is in the end simply a natural extension of a philosopher's inclination to wonder. This is a collection of highly engaging and provocative essays by top scholars in the increasingly interrelated fields of Philosophy, Film Studies, and Communication Arts that deal with the epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics, and genre dynamics of horror cinema past and present. Contributors include Curtis Bowman, No l Carroll, Elizabeth Cowie, Angela Curran, Cynthia Freeland, Michael Grant, Matt Hills, Deborah Knight, George McKnight, Ken Mogg, Aaron Smuts, Robert C. Solomon, and J.P. Telotte. Over the past several years, one of the hottest topics in the realm of philosophical aesthetics has been cinematic horror. The emotional effects it has on audiences, the mysterious metaphysics of its impossible beings, the controversial ethics of its violent contents-these are just a few of the concerns to have drawn the attention of scholars and students alike. . .not to mention the genre's legions of fans. Since the publication of No l Carroll's groundbreaking study, The Philosophy of Horror; or, Paradoxes of the Heart (1990), and including most recently Cynthia Freeland's The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror (2000), a plethora of articles have been authored by seemingly normal philosophers about the decidedly abnormal activities of the antagonists of fright flicks.

Download or read book Violent Affect written by Marco Abel and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Countering previous studies of violent images based on representational and, consequently, moralistic assumptions, which, the author argues, inevitably reinforce the very violence they critique. He explains how violent images work upon the world.

Download or read book Intimate Violence written by Laura E. Tanner and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1994-11-22 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Tanner deals with the central question of all narrative texts: how the reader is manipulated into empathy or distance by the text.... This study... is the sort that needs to be redone in every classroom and by every mature reader.... Tanner offers provocative and useful discussions of rape and torture... " -- Choice "This thoughtful and disturbing book raises serious questions about 'the consequences... of reading representations of rape and torture.' " -- American Literature "In this incisive exploration of twentieth-century novels, art, and ads, Laura Tanner explains the mechanisms by which reader and viewer are implicated in violence. Equally effective as a challenge to textual assault is the grace and gentleness of Tanner's own prose. Intimate Violence signals the emergence of an astute and humane critical voice." -- Wendy Steiner Through an examination of such notorious works as The White Hotel and American Psycho, Laura Tanner leads us in a disturbing exploration of the reader's complicity with fictional depictions of intimate violence.

Download or read book Working with Violence written by Jessica Yakeley and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-09-16 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A psychoanalytic understanding of violence is key to successful treatment strategies. This book draws on the expanding discipline of forensic psychotherapy to explore the theory behind violent behaviour in adults. With key definitions and practical case studies, it offers an accessible framework for mental health workers.

Download or read book Perverse Psychology written by Jemma Tosh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-25 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Psychology defines people who take pleasure in the suffering of others as having a form of mental illness, while media representations frame such behaviour as ‘evil’. This is hotly contested territory, not least where sexual violence is concerned – violence which feminist voices argue is related to power rather than sex. Perverse Psychology examines psychiatric constructions of sexual violence and transgender people from the 19th century until the latest DSM-5 diagnoses. It uses discourse analysis to interrogate the discursive boundaries between 'normal' and 'abnormal' rape, as well as the pathologization of gender and sexual diversity. The book illuminates for the first time the parallels between psychiatry’s construction of gender diversity and sexual violence, and leads us to question whether it is violence that the profession finds so intriguing, or the gender nonconformity it represents. Perverse Psychology is ideal reading for postgraduate students and researchers in the fields of critical psychology, discourse analysis, feminism, transgender people, LGBT psychology, and the history of psychiatry.

Download or read book Dandyism written by Len Gutkin and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2020-02-26 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "dandy," a nineteenth-century character and concept exemplified in such works as Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, reverberates in surprising corners of twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture. Establishing this character as a kind of shorthand for a diverse range of traits and tendencies, including gentlemanliness, rebelliousness, androgyny, aristocratic pretension, theatricality, and extravagance, Len Gutkin traces Victorian aesthetic precedents in the work of the modernist avant-garde, the noir novel, Beatnik experimentalism, and the postmodern thriller. As defined in the period between the fin de siècle and modernism, dandyism was inextricable from representations of queerness. But, rinsed of its suspect associations with the effeminate, dandyism would exert influence over such macho authors as Hemingway and Chandler, who harnessed its decadent energy. Dandyism, Gutkin argues, is a species of gendered charisma. The performative masquerade of Wilde’s decadent dandy is an ancestor to both the gender performance at work in American cowboy lore and the precious self-presentation of twenty-first-century hipsters. We cannot understand modernism and postmodernism’s negotiation of gender, aesthetic abstraction, or the culture of celebrity without the dandy. Analyzing the characteristic focus on costume, consumption, and the well-turned phrase in readings of figures ranging from Wyndham Lewis, Djuna Barnes, and William Burroughs to Patricia Highsmith, Bret Easton Ellis, and Ben Lerner, Dandyism reveals the Victorian dandy’s legacy across the twentieth century, providing a revisionist history of the relationship between Victorian aesthetics and twentieth-century literature.

Download or read book Hypocrisy Unmasked written by Ronald C. Naso and published by Jason Aronson. This book was released on 2010-03-18 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hypocrisy Unmasked explores the motives, meanings, and mechanisms of hypocrisy, challenging two principal psychoanalytic assumptions: First, that hypocrisy expresses deviant, uncontrollable impulses or follows exclusively from superego weakness; and second, that it can be understood solely in terms of intrapsychic factors without reference to the influences of the field. Ronald C. Naso argues that each of these assumptions devolve into criticisms rather than explanations and demonstrates that hypocrisy represents a compromise among intrapsychic, interpersonal, situational, and cultural/linguistic forces in an individual life. Hypocrisy Unmasked accords a healthy respect to the hypocrite's existentiality, including variables like opportunity and chance, and focuses on situations where the hypocrite's desires differ from those of others and on the moral principles that count in decision-making rather than how they are subsequently rationalized. Ultimately, hypocrisy exposes the ineradicable moral ambiguity of the human condition and the irreconcilability of desires and obligations.

Download or read book Freud the Contemporary Super ego and Western Morality written by Giosuè Ghisalberti and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-10-09 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Freud, the Contemporary Super-ego, and Western Morality traces the origins of the relationship between the morality of the super-ego and the destructive impulse of the death drive in the liberal democracies of the 21st century. Giosuè Ghisalberti begins by refuting the analysis by contemporary social theorists of the phenomenon described as "the return of the religious," presenting instead a comprehensive set of ideas as outlined by Freud in the writings of the 1920s and the analysis of a contemporary theological-political unconscious. Ghisalberti argues that the psyche of the liberal West has regressed to an infantile and primitive present, driven by an unconscious hostility towards the Oedipus complex and, more comprehensively, to Western civilization as a whole. The book re-examines Freud’s psychoanalytic ideas on the nature of obsessions, interpreted first from the murder of the primal father in Totem and Taboo, and turns to his grounding ideals of intelligence, creativity, and freedom as the affirmation of the coming-to-be-human in modernity. Freud, the Contemporary Super-ego, and Western Morality will be of great interest to psychoanalysts in practice and in training. It will also be key reading for academics and scholars of psychoanalytic studies, philosophy, political theory and the humanities.

Download or read book Programming the Future written by Sherryl Vint and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-01 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 9/11 to COVID-19, the twenty-first century looks increasingly dystopian—and so do its television shows. Long-form science fiction narratives take one step further the fears of today: liberal democracy in crisis, growing economic precarity, the threat of terrorism, and omnipresent corporate control. At the same time, many of these shows attempt to visualize alternatives, using dystopian extrapolations to spotlight the possibility of building a better world. Programming the Future examines how recent speculative television takes on the contradictions of the neoliberal order. Sherryl Vint and Jonathan Alexander consider a range of popular SF narratives of the last two decades, including Battlestar Galactica, Watchmen, Colony, The Man in the High Castle, The Expanse, and Mr. Robot. They argue that science fiction television foregrounds governance as part of explaining the novel institutions and norms of its imagined futures. In so doing, SF shows allegorize and critique contemporary social, political, and economic developments, helping audiences resist the naturalization of the status quo. Vint and Alexander also draw on queer theory to explore the representation of family structures and their relationship to larger social structures. Recasting both dystopian and utopian narratives, Programming the Future shows how depictions of alternative-world political struggles speak to urgent real-world issues of identity, belonging, and social and political change.