American Consumer Culture and Its Society: From F. Scott Fitzgerald`s 1920s Modernism to Bret Easton Ellis`1980s Blank Fiction

American Consumer Culture and Its Society: From F. Scott Fitzgerald`s 1920s Modernism to Bret Easton Ellis`1980s Blank Fiction PDF Author: Johannes Malkmes
Publisher: Diplomica Verlag
ISBN: 3842855664
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
Die vorliegende Studie stellt eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit der amerikanischen Konsumkultur des 20. Jahrhunderts dar. Dabei wird ein Schwerpunkt auf die historische Entwicklung von der Ständegesellschaft des späten 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhunderts bis hin zur Klassengesellschaft des 20. Jahrhunderts gelegt, da dieser epochale Wandel in bisherigen vergleichbaren literaturwissenschaftlichen Diskussionen zur Konsumkultur trotz seiner themenbezogenen Relevanz keine adäquate Berücksichtigung fand. Der Begriff der Konsumkultur als interdisziplinäres Problem wird nicht als gegeben verstanden und ausführlich definiert. Die soziokulturelle Entwicklung wird im Rahmen von F. Scott Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby (1925) und Bret Easton Ellis American Psycho (1991) nachvollzogen, da beide Werke ihre Hauptdarsteller anhand ihrer sozialen Herkunft, ihrer sozialen Milieus und ihres Konsums als stereotypische Vertreter der jeweiligen Epoche charakterisieren und versinnbildlichen. In beiden Werken wird der jeweilige kulturelle Hintergrund – das amerikanische Jazz Age sowie die Reagan Administration mit ihrer Yuppie Kultur – äußerst kritisch abgehandelt. Eine vergleichende Analyse beider Werke in Bezug auf die gravierende Entwicklung ihrer literarischen Darstellung von Konsum im Verlauf des 20. Jahrhunderts unter kritischer Berücksichtigung des jeweiligen volkswirtschaftlichen, politischen und gesellschaftlichen Hintergrunds wurde in dieser Form noch nicht veröffentlicht. Ein Fokus dieser Arbeit betrifft die Zwischenkriegszeit in Jahren von 1920 bis 1930, da diese Dekade maßgebend war für den epochalen Wandel der amerikanischen Klassen- hin zu einer Konsumgesellschaft und des amerikanischen Lebensstils zum Ende der 1980er Jahre. Detailliert betrachtet werden in diesem Zusammenhang konkrete Konsumverstärker wie fortschreitende Technologien, Entwicklungen zu Mode- und Freizeitbranchen, finanzielle Marktentwicklungen und der geografische Wandel. Die Entstehung der World Trade Organisation symbolisiert letztendlich den Sieg von Demokratie und amerikanisierter, globaler Konsumkultur. Anhand der genannten Werke wird nicht nur der Umgang mit Konsum interpretiert, sondern auch dessen Versprechen, die propagierende Darstellung des amerikanischen Traumes, die eine gravierende Veränderung hin zum kapitalistischen Materialismus aufzeigt.

American Consumer Culture and Its Society: From F. Scott Fitzgerald`s 1920s Modernism to Bret Easton Ellis`1980s Blank Fiction

American Consumer Culture and Its Society: From F. Scott Fitzgerald`s 1920s Modernism to Bret Easton Ellis`1980s Blank Fiction PDF Author: Johannes Malkmes
Publisher: Diplomica Verlag
ISBN: 3842855664
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
Die vorliegende Studie stellt eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit der amerikanischen Konsumkultur des 20. Jahrhunderts dar. Dabei wird ein Schwerpunkt auf die historische Entwicklung von der Ständegesellschaft des späten 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhunderts bis hin zur Klassengesellschaft des 20. Jahrhunderts gelegt, da dieser epochale Wandel in bisherigen vergleichbaren literaturwissenschaftlichen Diskussionen zur Konsumkultur trotz seiner themenbezogenen Relevanz keine adäquate Berücksichtigung fand. Der Begriff der Konsumkultur als interdisziplinäres Problem wird nicht als gegeben verstanden und ausführlich definiert. Die soziokulturelle Entwicklung wird im Rahmen von F. Scott Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby (1925) und Bret Easton Ellis American Psycho (1991) nachvollzogen, da beide Werke ihre Hauptdarsteller anhand ihrer sozialen Herkunft, ihrer sozialen Milieus und ihres Konsums als stereotypische Vertreter der jeweiligen Epoche charakterisieren und versinnbildlichen. In beiden Werken wird der jeweilige kulturelle Hintergrund – das amerikanische Jazz Age sowie die Reagan Administration mit ihrer Yuppie Kultur – äußerst kritisch abgehandelt. Eine vergleichende Analyse beider Werke in Bezug auf die gravierende Entwicklung ihrer literarischen Darstellung von Konsum im Verlauf des 20. Jahrhunderts unter kritischer Berücksichtigung des jeweiligen volkswirtschaftlichen, politischen und gesellschaftlichen Hintergrunds wurde in dieser Form noch nicht veröffentlicht. Ein Fokus dieser Arbeit betrifft die Zwischenkriegszeit in Jahren von 1920 bis 1930, da diese Dekade maßgebend war für den epochalen Wandel der amerikanischen Klassen- hin zu einer Konsumgesellschaft und des amerikanischen Lebensstils zum Ende der 1980er Jahre. Detailliert betrachtet werden in diesem Zusammenhang konkrete Konsumverstärker wie fortschreitende Technologien, Entwicklungen zu Mode- und Freizeitbranchen, finanzielle Marktentwicklungen und der geografische Wandel. Die Entstehung der World Trade Organisation symbolisiert letztendlich den Sieg von Demokratie und amerikanisierter, globaler Konsumkultur. Anhand der genannten Werke wird nicht nur der Umgang mit Konsum interpretiert, sondern auch dessen Versprechen, die propagierende Darstellung des amerikanischen Traumes, die eine gravierende Veränderung hin zum kapitalistischen Materialismus aufzeigt.

Abandon All Hope - Consumerism and Loss of Identity in Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho As an Example of Blank Fiction

Abandon All Hope - Consumerism and Loss of Identity in Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho As an Example of Blank Fiction PDF Author: Anja Schiel
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3638936422
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 117

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Book Description
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

Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho

Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho PDF Author: Julian Murphet
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0826452450
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Book Description
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.

American Psycho

American Psycho PDF Author: Bret Easton Ellis
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 1447277716
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
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.

Bret Easton Ellis's Controversial Fiction

Bret Easton Ellis's Controversial Fiction PDF Author: Sonia Baelo-Allué
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441126481
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
Both literary author and celebrity, Bret Easton Ellis represents a type of contemporary writer who draws from both high and the low culture, using popular culture references, styles and subject matters in a literary fiction that goes beyond mere entertainment. His fiction, arousing the interest of the academia, mass media and general public, has fuelled heated controversy over his work. This controversy has often prevented serious analysis of his fiction, and this book is the first monograph to fill in this gap by offering a comprehensive textual and contextual analysis of his most important works up to the latest novel Imperial Bedrooms. Offering a study of the reception of each novel, the influence of popular, mass and consumer culture in them, and the analysis of their literary style, it takes into account the controversies surrounding the novels and the changes produced in the shifty terrain of the literary marketplace. It offers anyone studying contemporary American fiction a thorough and unique analysis of Ellis's work and his own place in the literary and cultural panorama.

Lunar Park

Lunar Park PDF Author: Bret Easton Ellis
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307264300
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
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!

Less Than Zero

Less Than Zero PDF Author: Bret Easton Ellis
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307756467
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
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!

Glamorama

Glamorama PDF Author: Bret Easton Ellis
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 0330474146
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 656

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Book Description
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

Transfigurations

Transfigurations PDF Author: Asbjørn Grønstad
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
ISBN: 908964010X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
In many senses, viewers have cut their teeth on the violence in American cinema: from Anthony Perkins slashing Janet Leigh in the most infamous of shower scenes; to the 1970s masterpieces of Martin Scorsese, Sam Peckinpah and Francis Ford Coppola; to our present-day undertakings in imagining global annihilations through terrorism, war, and alien grudges. Transfigurations brings our cultural obsession with film violence into a renewed dialogue with contemporary theory. Grønstad argues that the use of violence in Hollywood films should be understood semiotically rather than viewed realistically; Tranfigurations thus alters both our methodology of reading violence in films and the meanings we assign to them, depicting violence not as a self-contained incident, but as a convoluted network of our own cultural ideologies and beliefs.

Balm in Gilead

Balm in Gilead PDF Author: Timothy Larsen
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 0830872965
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Marilynne Robinson is one of the most eminent public intellectuals in America today, and her writing offers probing meditations on the Christian faith. Based on the 2018 Wheaton Theology Conference, this volume brings together the thoughts of leading theologians, historians, literary scholars, and church leaders who engaged in theological dialogue with Robinson's work—and with the author herself.