Download or read book Violence In American Psycho Forms And Function written by Till Neuhaus and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2020-07-24 with total page 29 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, Bielefeld University (Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft), language: English, abstract: Why was there such a public outcry about American Psycho? To add further dimensions to this question, this paper will try to provide a deeper insight on the functions of violence in American Psycho. To pursue that goal, this paper follows a certain structure: After providing background information on the author, historical context and also the creational process of the book itself, violence as portrayed in American Psycho will be analyzed. Therefore, a theoretical framework, which ascribes specific functions to certain forms of violence, will be created. In a second step, the forms of violence as presented in American Psycho will be discussed and classified on the basis of the previously constructed framework. After having found, named and classified distinct features of violence and their functions in the novel, it will be investigated to what extent the horror Bret Easton Ellis has created differs from traditional illustrations of violence and horror. The overarching question of this segment will be: What did Bret Easton Ellis do differently which would explain the audience’s intensive feeling of horror? The introductory hypothesis is that American Psycho was able to use violence on various levels and with multiple functions. Violence is not solely used to assign certain character traits to the protagonist and the society he lives in but also serves as vehicle to overcome the protagonist’s problems, namely anonymity of the cold-hearted world presented in the novel. Furthermore, violence also serves as a symbol for a constant and omnipresent threat, which creates the feeling of horror. Additionally, violence is also used as a provocation while simultaneously hinting at the absence of ethics, which then again turns out to be social criticism of the protagonist’s world. In addition to this, the horror Bret Easton Ellis creates unites well-known concepts, brands, locations, etc. and combines those with an, until then, unknown feature, namely irrational and thereby uncontrollable violence. This creates a feeling of realism which, together with the absences of ethics, moral judgment and rationality, leaves the reader behind in a more vulnerable state than solely explicit violence in a surreal setting. This hypothesis will be taken up by the end of the paper and will then be verified, falsified or further modified.
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 Consuming and Consumed People Violence in American Psycho written by Florian Burkhardt and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2005-11-04 with total page 15 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 2,0, University of Stuttgart, language: English, abstract: Bret Easton Ellis’American psychohas been a highly controversial book. Many critics condemned this novel before it had been published so Ellis even had to search for a new publishing company. The indignation atAmerican psychohad been so fierce, it verged on hysteria and some interest groups (feminist and religious groups for instance) agitated against the author and his work1. The main reason why critics reacted that outraged was the explicit and detailed description of violence in this book2. In this paper I will discuss the appearence of violence inAmerican psycho.But first I want to create a picture of social phenomena in the USA of the 80’s as they are described in the novel, in order to provide the setting, the atmosphere in which the violence takes place. This will help to give an opinion of this violence and to interpret it. Then I will discuss how violence is presented in the text. In the fourth
Download or read book Bret Easton Ellis s American Psycho written by Julian Murphet and published by A&C Black. 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 Bret Easton Ellis written by Naomi Mandel and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-01-20 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collection of new critical essays on Bret Easton Ellis, focusing on his later novels: American Psycho (1991), Glamorama (1999), and Lunar Park (2005).
Download or read book The Modern American Novel of Violence written by Patrick W. Shaw and published by Whitston Publishing Company. This book was released on 2000 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: H. Rap Brown observed that "Violence is as American as cherry pie." Through insightful and absorbing commentaries on writers as diverse as William Faulkner and Bret Easton Ellis, "The Modern American Novel of Violence" defines literary violence and examines the phenomenon of cultural violence that Brown correctly noted about America.
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 Lunar Park written by Bret Easton Ellis and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2005-08-16 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the New York Times bestselling author of American Psycho and Less Than Zero comes a chilling tale that combines reality, memoir, and fantasy to create a fascinating portrait of this most controversial writer but also a deeply moving novel about love and loss, parents and children, and ultimately forgiveness. “John Cheever writes The Shining.” —Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly Bret Ellis, the narrator of Lunar Park, is the bestselling writer whose first novel Less Than Zero catapulted him to international stardom while he was still in college. In the years that followed he found himself adrift in a world of wealth, drugs, and fame, as well as dealing with the unexpected death of his abusive father. After a decade of decadence a chance for salvation arrives; the chance to reconnect with an actress he was once involved with, and their son. But almost immediately his new life is threatened by a freak sequence of events and a bizarre series of murders that all seem to connect to Ellis’s past. His attempts to save his new world from his own demons makes Lunar Park Ellis’s most suspenseful novel. Look for Bret Easton Ellis’s new novel, The Shards!
Download or read book Abandon All Hope consumerism and loss of identity in Bret Easton Ellis s American Psycho as an example of blank fiction written by Anja Schiel and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2008-04-23 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,5, University of Hamburg (Sprach-, Literatur- und Medienwissenschaft), language: English, abstract: Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho has been labeled many things from “Brat Pack Fiction” to “Generation X” to “Minimal Realism”. While the classification of the novel might be difficult and it has often been misunderstood for its extremely violent scenes, what is clear to the attentive reader is its critique of consumer culture Critics have acknowledged an emergence of a large number of writings dealing with this topic in contemporary American literature in the recent past. These novels focus on the relationship of American youth with consumer culture with a seemingly non-elaborate content and style. Attempts of explaining this kind of writing, which has also been called “fiction of insurgency”, “new narrative”, “downtown writing” and “punk fiction”, range from millennial angst to the classification of this literary movement as part of the postmodern culture. What seems clear is that these narrations are closely related to the society they have been created in. The way these texts incorporate products of their time as a constant accompanying element places them very clearly in a specific time period. The apparent non-existence of complexity concerning the style, which at times reminds the reader of a movie script or a sequence of an MTV video, has, in the case of American Psycho, caused many critics to classify the novel as boring and deny the author the status of an artist. Exactly this seeming meaninglessness of these novels argues in favor of a term introduced by critics James Annesley and Elizabeth Young: Blank fiction, or Blank Generation Fiction. The term Blank fiction seems to capture perfectly the emptiness created by consumer culture that has found its way into these narratives not simply in its context but also by means of its language, incorporating consumer goods into the narrative as secondary characters, in the case of American Psycho ascribing more character to these objects than to the protagonists.
Download or read book New Perspectives on Narrative and Multimodality written by Ruth Page and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-09-10 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study investigates the richly diverse but integrated semiotic potential of storytelling. Unlike other interdisciplinary approaches to narrative studies which have privileged the study of words in storytelling, this unique collection provides a much needed analysis of how narrative operates using combinations of visual, typographic, aural, gestural and haptic resources. Although both multimodal theory and narrative studies have been invigorated by a variety of theoretical approaches, this volume seeks to avoid a single dominant paradigm. Instead, the contributors use literary criticism, linguistics and new media frameworks in a series of critical studies that are directly engaged with a range of multimodal stories. The contributors analyze works that include oral accounts of personal experience, opera, cartoons, print literature and new media forms of storytelling such as experimental digital fiction and fanfiction.
Download or read book Black Male Violence in Perspective written by P. Tony Jackson and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-05-08 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Male Violence in Perspective: Towards Afrocentric Intervention represents a synthesis of lived experience, authoritative research, and Afro-centric perspective on one of the most controversial topics of our day. It examines violence by and among Black men, as it is inextricably tied to its context; the history of violence in America including colonialism, expansionism, and concepts of manifest destiny. Acknowledging important concepts like Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” and Joy DeGruy-Leary’s “Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome,” and chronicling the devastating and injurious effects of racism, the text moves in a clinical direction. It identifies and addresses the resulting dangerous triad of frustration, anger, and depression and how they come together clinically to impact young Black men resulting in violent outcomes. It explores the psychology underlying violent behavior, delving into the socioeconomic realities that are very much a part of the landscape of violence in America. Tony Jackson utilizes cases from his career as a therapist as well as examples from actual life experience to illustrate challenging concepts. More importantly, Black Male Violence in Perspective proposes a theory of intervention and treatment with a discussion on quantitative and qualitative research methods.
Download or read book Glamorama written by Bret Easton Ellis and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2010-12-10 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Glamorama, Bret Easton Ellis delivers a shadowy, looking-glass world. It is a world where fame and fashion, terror and mayhem meet – and begin to resemble the familiar surface of our own lives . . . The centre of the world: 1990s Manhattan. Victor Ward, a model with perfect abs and all the right friends, is seen and photographed everywhere. Even in places he hasn’t been, and with people he doesn’t know. On the eve of opening the trendiest nightclub in New York history, he’s living with one beautiful model and having an affair with another. Now it’s time to move to the next stage. But the future he gets is not the one he had in mind . . . 'Does for the cold, minimal ’90s what American Psycho did for the Wall Street greed of the ’80s. You name it, he manages to get it all in' – Vogue
Download or read book Violence and American Cinema written by J. David Slocum and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American cinema has always been violent, and never more so than now: exploding heads, buses that blow up if they stop, racial attacks, and general mayhem. From slapstick's comic violence to film noir, from silent cinema to Tarantino, violence has been an integral part of America on screen. This new volume in a successful series analyzes violence, examining its nature, its effects, and its cinematic and social meaning.
Download or read book Violence and Nonviolence written by Gregg Barak and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2003-02-24 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Gregg Barak′s Violence and Nonviolence is a thoughtful, comprehensive examination of violence in the United States. Structurally and conceptually this book works. Barak addresses violence in an interdisciplinary way, addressing history, psychology, biology, cultural studies, and sociology. Moreover, Barak does an excellent job of discussing the intersection of race, class, and gender and those relationships with violence." -- Heather Melton, University of Utah "Clearly, the strength of this book is its comprehensive and reciprocal approach. I found this to be an enjoyable and provocative book... that treats the topic holistically and offers a vision for overcoming current patterns of violence. I am convinced that this is an important work that will ultimately be well-received by undergraduates, graduate students, violence specialists, and general readers." -- Mathew T. Lee, University of Akron "I think that the strengths of this book are twofold: Barak′s approach disaggregates violence into interpersonal, institutional, and structural violence which is very important yet rarely done; the latter part of the book explores the pathways to nonviolence, an underrepresented area in the study of violence." --Charis Kubrin/Sociology, George Washington University "I have devoted close to 20 years studying and teaching about violence and I must say that this is a comprehensive book....I strongly believe that Barak has done an outstanding review of the extant literature and touches upon key issues of central concern to those of us who are social scientific experts on violence." --Walter Dekeseredy, Ohio University Violence and Nonviolence: Pathways to Understanding is the first book to provide an integrative, systematic approach to the study of violence and nonviolence in one volume. Eminent scholar and award-winning author Gregg Barak examines virtually all forms of violence—from verbal abuse to genocide—and treats all of these expressions of violence as interpersonal, institutional, and structural occurrences. In the context of recovery and nonviolence, Barak addresses peace and conflict studies, legal rights, social justice, and various nonviolent movements. Employing an interdisciplinary framework, Barak emphasizes the importance of culture, media, sexuality, gender, and social structure in developing a comprehensive theory of these two separate, but inseparable phenomena. This innovative and accessible volume includes Figures, tables, and illustrations that reinforce important concepts and relationships Introduces a new, original theory of reciprocal violence and nonviolence Numerous case studies on violence and recovery throughout the book Chapter summaries and review questions to aid student comprehension Models of nonviolence such as "mutuality," "altruistic humanism," "positive peacemaking," and "resiliency" Designed to be a core text for graduate and undergraduate courses on violence in criminology, sociology, criminal justice, and social work departments, Violence and Nonviolence is also an outstanding supplementary text for violence against women and criminal behavior courses. This book will transform the way students and readers think about violence, nonviolence, and the reciprocal relationship between the two.
Download or read book Finance Fictions written by Arne De Boever and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2018-03-06 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finance Fictions takes the measure of what it means to live in a world ruled by high finance by examining the tension between psychosis and realism that plays out in the contemporary finance novel. When the things traded at the center of the economy cease to be things at all, but highly abstracted speculations, how do we come to see the real? What sorts of narrative can accurately approach the actual workings of a neoliberal economy marked by accelerating cycles of market crashes, economic and political crisis, and austerity? Revisiting such twentieth-century classics of the genre as Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, De Boever argues that the twenty-first century is witnessing the birth of a new kind of realistic novel that can make sense of complex financial instruments like collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and digital algorithms operating at speeds faster than what human beings or computers can record. If in 1989 Wolfe could still urge novelists to work harder to “tame the billion-footed beast of reality,” today’s economic reality confronts us with a difference that is qualitative rather than quantitative: a new financial ontology requiring new modes of thinking and writing. Mobilizing the philosophical thought of Quentin Meillassoux in the close reading of finance novels by Robert Harris, Michel Houellebecq, Ben Lerner and less well-known works of conceptual writing such as Mathew Timmons’ Credit, Finance Fictions argues that realism is in for a speculative update if it wants to take on the contemporary economy—an “if” whose implications turn out to be deeply political. Part literary study and part philosophical inquiry, Finance Fictions seeks to contribute to a new mindset for creative and critical work on finance in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Weird Al written by Nathan Rabin and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “fun and colorful” biography of the accordion-toting comedy legend—with rare photos, lyrics, lists, tweets, and more from Al himself (Publishers Weekly). The undisputed king of pop-culture parody, “Weird Al” Yankovic has sold more comedy recordings than any other artist in history, receiving three Grammy Awards (and fourteen nominations) in the process. This is a comprehensive illustrated tribute to this icon of the American humor landscape, the man behind such classics as “Eat It,” “Amish Paradise,” and “White & Nerdy.” Covering more than three decades of hilarious songs, videos, and concert performances, and his life story in words and pictures—and featuring an introduction, lists, tweets, and photo captions from Yankovic himself—Weird Al: The Book is the ultimate companion piece to an extraordinary career. “Part biography and part pop culture museum . . . a treat.” —Huffington Post
Download or read book Existentialist Engagement in Wallace Eggers and Foer written by Allard den Dulk and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-06-30 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The novels of David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer are increasingly regarded as representing a new trend, an 'aesthetic sea change' in contemporary American literature. 'Post-postmodernism' and 'New Sincerity' are just two of the labels that have been attached to this trend. But what do these labels mean? What characterizes and connects these novels? Den Dulk shows that the connection between these works lies in their shared philosophical dimension. On the one hand, they portray excessive self-reflection and endless irony as the two main problems of contemporary Western life. On the other hand, the novels embody an attempt to overcome these problems: sincerity, reality-commitment and community are portrayed as the virtues needed to achieve a meaningful life. This shared philosophical dimension is analyzed by viewing the novels in light of the existentialist philosophies of S�ren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Albert Camus.
