Abstract
In the twenty-first century, Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991) is widely revered as a scathing satire of consumer capitalism. Yet, initial critical response often condemned the novel as the textual embodiment of “evil” itself. Placing American Psycho in conversation with contemporaneous debates surrounding the subversive potential of performativity, this chapter demonstrates how—to its early critics—the novel’s particular brand of “textual evil” stems from its elision of the boundaries between performance-as-parody and performance-as-recitation. From such a perspective, the true “evil” of American Psycho is its ability to expose the political limits of performativity itself.
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Notes
- 1.
See also Lee 2013, Hume 2011, Colby 2011, etc. This rising acknowledgment of the text’s satirical dimension is both exemplified (Abel 2001, 57) and perpetuated (Eldridge 2008, 23) in Mary Harron’s widely acclaimed cinematic adaptation (2000). However, as we shall see, a purely satirical reading of Ellis’ text is, in many ways, as simplistic as those which absolutely refuse to engage with its parodic orientation.
- 2.
This dynamic climaxes in the novel’s final scene which depicts a chaotic heteroglossia of glib, meaningless idioms such as “just say no” (211) and “life sucks and then you die” (211) that dissolves discourse into “random fragments of linguistic connection that break apart as quickly as they form” (Simpson, 153).
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Gardiner, N. (2021). Textual Evil and Performative Precarity in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. In: Zouidi, N. (eds) Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_27
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