Download or read book American Psycho and Social Criticism Illusion or Reality written by Lena Groß and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2014-02-24 with total page 14 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 1,0, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, language: English, abstract: The filming of Bret Easton Ellis’ bestseller novel American Psycho caused a major scandal after its publication in 2000 (Lee Brien). It covers the story of the serial killer Patrick Bateman, who enjoys a good reputation everywhere in Manhattan. Bateman is a young, athletic, handsome, successful, and stereotypical 1980s yuppie, who you are able to see in magazines, journals, advertising for Calvin Klein or Hugo Boss, and on Wall Street. On the other hand, he murders, rapes, tortures, mutilates, and cannibalizes his victims, but his cruel acts remain undetected. At first sight, Patrick’s behavior seems very irritating because he neither provides the audience with any reasons for his murders, nor with any psychological insight into his character to justify his actions. Taking a closer look, his behavior and violence are an expression of the materialistic, superficial nature of the American society to which Bateman wants to belong “and into which his sickness and inhumanity do actually ‘fit’” (Horsley 222). Although a lot of Bateman’s brutal actions are shown, at the end of the movie the audience comes to question if all these murders really happened because some inconsistencies in his story become apparent e.g. Bateman outlines the murder of a man, who at this point was not even in town. Therefore, the question is raised as to whether the murders are real or just a product of Bateman’s imagination, and if they are real, is the society so over the top that not even the crime matters and he is able to escape unpunished? In this paper, this question and especially what the murders are about to express either way will be analyzed in view of social criticism. Therefore, first of all, American society in the 1980s will be outlined to help the reader better understand the contemporary historical background to which the movie refers. Subsequently, the amoral materialism in American consumer society pictured in American Psycho will be described to clarify the social circumstances Bateman lives in. Accordingly, Bateman’s cruel actions will be analyzed and its truth content will be discussed to later on conclude that this kind of society is not able to fulfill his life and by the help of violence Bateman wants to escape the conformity of America’s superficial society.
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 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 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 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 Parallelism of character and concept in American Psycho and Cosmopolis written by Timm Gehrmann and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2007-02-19 with total page 19 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Wuppertal, course: Issues in American Society - Literary Negotiations, language: English, abstract: American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis and Cosmpolis by Don De Lillo both are stories that depict the decadence of their time, hinting at social, moral and political issues that are of importance in their respective times. In both books New York as the world centre of capitalism serves as a stage for two main characters who are shapen by the enormous amounts of money they have at their disposal. The characters and their interaction with society are the central points in both books. While Don De Lillo’s Cosmopolis deals at a time no clearly defined, which is probably supposed to be the post modern world of the early 2000s, Bret Easton Ellis’ book is set in the booming New York of the 80s where people who work on Wall Street are treated like pop stars and many of them well known as heroes of capitalism (e.g. Warren Buffet and Donald Trump). The book by Bret Easton Ellis takes us into this decadent cocain addicted world, that basically revolves the hunger for parties and sex. The book by Don De Lillo presents a totally different atmosphere. The atmosphere is rather shapen by fear of those that have come too short in the capitalist world and the security needs of those who work on wall street who have by now become anonymous figures, that may only be identified by their stretch limousines. The world of Cosmopolis has become darker and more dangerous; wild parties are no longer celebrated, just as get togethers of business people don’t seem to happen in public, mainly for security reasons. The pace of the world has also changed as computers and video transmit news from all over the world into cars that have become indistinguishable from offices. Yet both books have a lot in common in terms of the topics they deal with and the kinds of characters they portrait. While Cosmopolis only draws a kind of gloomy atmosphere, American Psycho is also one of the funniest books I have ever read and has been turned into a fantastic movie, with which I have compared some of the scenes.
Download or read book Red Storm Rising written by Tom Clancy and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1987-07-01 with total page 740 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the Jack Ryan series comes an electrifying #1 New York Times bestseller—a standalone military thriller that envisions World War 3... A chillingly authentic vision of modern war, Red Storm Rising is as powerful as it is ambitious. Using the latest advancements in military technology, the world's superpowers battle on land, sea, and air for ultimate global control. It is a story you will never forget. Hard-hitting. Suspenseful. And frighteningly real. “Harrowing...tense...a chilling ring of truth.”—TIME
Download or read book Pulse Digital and Switching Waveforms written by Jacob Millman and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 Empire of Illusion written by Chris Hedges and published by Knopf Canada. This book was released on 2009-07-28 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer prize–winner Chris Hedges charts the dramatic and disturbing rise of a post-literate society that craves fantasy, ecstasy and illusion. Chris Hedges argues that we now live in two societies: One, the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world, that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other, a growing majority, is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. In this “other society,” serious film and theatre, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins. In the tradition of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Hedges navigates this culture — attending WWF contests as well as Ivy League graduation ceremonies — exposing an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion.
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 with total page 117 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 i
Download or read book Bunny written by Mona Awad and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER Soon to be a major motion picture "Jon Swift + Witches of Eastwick + Kelly 'Get In Trouble' Link + Mean Girls + Creative Writing Degree Hell! No punches pulled, no hilarities dodged, no meme unmangled! O Bunny you are sooo genius!" —Margaret Atwood, via Twitter "A wild, audacious and ultimately unforgettable novel." —Michael Schaub, Los Angeles Times "Awad is a stone-cold genius." —Ann Bauer, The Washington Post The Vegetarian meets Heathers in this darkly funny, seductively strange novel from the acclaimed author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl and Rouge "We were just these innocent girls in the night trying to make something beautiful. We nearly died. We very nearly did, didn't we?" Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny," and seem to move and speak as one. But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' fabled "Smut Salon," and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door--ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies' sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus "Workshop" where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision. The spellbinding new novel from one of our most fearless chroniclers of the female experience, Bunny is a down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic and terrible power of the imagination. Named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Vogue, Electric Literature, and The New York Public Library
Download or read book Less Than Zero written by Bret Easton Ellis and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-06-09 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The timeless classic from the acclaimed author of American Psycho about the lost generation of 1980s Los Angeles who experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age. • The basis for the cult-classic film "Possesses an unnerving air of documentary reality." —The New York Times They live in a world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money in a place devoid of feeling or hope. When Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college, he re-enters a landscape of limitless privilege and absolute moral entropy, where everyone drives Porsches, dines at Spago, and snorts mountains of cocaine. He tries to renew feelings for his girlfriend, Blair, and for his best friend from high school, Julian, who is careering into hustling and heroin. Clay's holiday turns into a dizzying spiral of desperation that takes him through the relentless parties in glitzy mansions, seedy bars, and underground rock clubs and also into the seamy world of L.A. after dark. Look for Bret Easton Ellis’s new novel, The Shards!
Download or read book Criticism and Truth written by Roland Barthes and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2007-02-22 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a major French writer, literary theorist and critic of French culture and society. His classic works include Mythologies and Camera Lucida. Criticism and Truth is a brilliant discussion of the language of literary criticism and a key work in the Barthes canon. It is a cultural, linguistic and intellectual challenge to those who believe in the clarity, flexibility and neutrality of language, couched in Barthes' own inimitable and provocative style.
Download or read book Laura Mulvey Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema 1975 written by Laura Mulvey and published by Koenig Books. This book was released on 2016 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since it first appeared in Screen in 1975, Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" has been an enduring point of reference for artists, filmmakers, writers and theorists. Mulvey's compelling polemical analysis of visual pleasure has provoked and encouraged others to take positions, challenge preconceived ideas and produce new works that owe their possibility to the generative qualities of this key essay. In this book, the celebrated New York-based video artist Rachel Rose (born 1986) has produced an innovative work that extends and adds to the essay's frame of reference. Drawing on 18th- and 19th-century fairy tales, and observing how their flat narratives matched the flatness of their depictions, Rose created collages that connect these pre-cinematic illustrations to what Mulvey describes in her essay--cinema flattening sexuality into visuality.
Download or read book Follies of the Wise written by Frederick Crews and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2007-03-01 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bestselling author and Berkeley professor of thirty years Frederick Crews has always considered himself a skeptic. Forty years ago he thought he had found a tradition of thought — Freudian psychoanalytic theory — that had skepticism built into it. He gradually realized, however, that true skepticism is an attitude of continual questioning. The more closely Crews examined the logical structure and institutional history of psychoanalysis, the more clearly he realized that Freud's system of thought lacked empirical rigor. Indeed, he came to see Freudian theory as the very model of a modern pseudoscience. Follies of the Wise contains Crews's best writing of the past fifteen years, including such controversial and widely quoted pieces as "The Unknown Freud" and "The Revenge of the Repressed," essays whose effects still reverberate today. In addition, his topics range from "Intelligent Design" creationism to theosophy, from psychological testing to UFO zaniness, from American Buddhism to the current state of literary criticism. A single theme animates his bracing and witty discussions: the temptation to reach for deep wisdom without attending to the little voice that asks, "Could I, by any chance, be deceiving myself here?"
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
