Abstract
Ellis entered the literary marketplace in 1985 with the publication of his first novel Less Than Zero. The public saw his arrival as more of a gate crashing of the literary establishment by another member of the “literary Brat Pack,” a pop culture brand created by The Village Voice in 1987, that Ellis laconically defines in Lunar Park as “essentially a media-made package: all fake flash and punk and menace” (LP, 8). The media objectification of Ellis, Jay McInerney, and Tama Janowitz; ironically mirrored in reality the reification of the human subject into celebrity culture that preoccupies much of Ellis’s fiction. He parodies his status as a young celebrity author in Lunar Park:
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Notes
Andrew Gibson, “Oublier Baudrillard: Melancholy of the Year 2000” in New Formations: Remembering the 1990s, no. 50, 2003; 134.
See the epigraph to The Rules of Attraction. See also Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato (London: Flamingo, 1988), 199.
Andrew Delbanco, The Real American Dream (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 106.
Nicki Sahlin, “But This Road Doesn’t Go Anywhere: The Existential Dilemma in Less Than Zero” in Critique, vol. XXXIII, no. 1, Fall 1991, 26.
Sahlin, “But This Road Doesn’t Go Anywhere.” Here Sahlin is citing David J. Geherin’s essay, “Nothingness and Beyond: Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays” Critique, XVI (1974), 64–78
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 42.
Gibson here is citing Pierre Bourdieu, The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, translated by Priscilla Prankhurst Ferguson et al. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 370. See “Oublier Baudrillard,” 129.
Gibson here is paraphrasing Pierre Bourdieu, Vontre-feux: Propos pour servir à la résistance contrel’invasionnéo-libérale, (Paris: Raisons d’Agor, 1998), 108–19. See “Oublier Baudrillard,” 129.
Gibson, “Thankless Earth, But Not Entirely: Event and Remainder in Contemporary Fiction,” in On the Turn: The Ethics of Fiction in Contemporary Narrative in English, edited by Barbara Aritzi and Silvia Martinez-Falquina (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 3.
Richard Burton’s definition of melancholy cited by Judith Sklar in her “Foreword” to Wolf Lepenies, Melancholy and Society, translated by Jeremy Gaines and Doris Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), vii.
Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (London: Routledge, 2008), 88–89.
Ibid., 88. Luckhurst here is referring to Robert Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 42–65.
Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of Our Time, translated by Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 102.
Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845) in Ludwig Eeuerbach, Karl Marx, Eriedrich Engels: German Socialist Philosophy, edited by Wolfgang Schirmacher (New York: Continuum, 1997), 105.
Julian Murphet, American Psycho: A Reader’s Guide (London: Continuum, 2002), 12.
Joan Didion, The White Album (London: Flamingo, 1993), 11–12.
Pamela Thurschwell, “Elvis Costello as a Cultural Icon and Cultural Critic” in Reading Rock and Roll: Authenticity, Appropriation, Aesthetics, (eds.) Kevin J.H. Dettmar and William Richey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 292. Thurschwell’s essay provides a detailed analysis of Elvis Costello as a cultural reference point in Less Than Zero.
Julian Murphet, Literature and Race in Los Angeles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 27.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge, 2006), 279.
Adorno, ZumVerhältnis, 133, cited by Slavoj Žižek in The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality (London: Verso, 1994), 19.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, “Introduction” to Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1997), xv.
Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (London: Routledge, 1992), 51.
Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century Erench Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 11.
Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, translated by Leon S. Roudiez (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1989), 121.
Žižek, The Métastases of Enjoyment, 19, citing Theodor Adorno’s “ZumVerhältnis von Soziologie und Psychologie” in Gesellshaftstheorie und Kulturkritik (Frankfurt: Surhkamp, 1975), 133.
Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), 159.
Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 39. Here Harvey is citing J. Rapley, Globalization and Inequality: Neoliberalism’s Downward Spiral (Boulder, CO: Lyne Reiner, 2004), 55.
Harvey, A Brief History, 39, citing A. Gramsci, Selections From the Prison Notebooks, translated by Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), 321–43.
Nathan Schwartz-Salant, “The Dead Self in Borderline Personality Disorders” in Pathologies of the Modern Self: Postmodern Studies on Narcissism, Schizophrenia and Depression, edited by David Michael Levin (New York: New York University Press, 1987), 149.
Veronica Hollinger, “Fantasies of Absence: The Postmodern Vampire” in Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger (eds.), Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 201.
The original article by Douglas Martin from March 27, 1964 is cited here, “About New York; Kitty Genovese: Would New York Still Turn Away?” in The New York Times, March 11, 1989. See also A.M. Rosenthal, Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
See Manning, R., Levine, M. & Collins, A., “The Kitty Genovese Murder and the Social Psychology of Helping: The Parable of the 38 Witnesses.” American Psychologist, 62 (6), (2007), 555–62.
Bonnie Ruth Strickland (ed.), The Gale Encyclopaedia of Psychology, Second Edition (New York: Gale Group, 2001), 102.
Lisa Downing, Desiring the Dead: Necrophilia and Nineteenth-Century French Literature (Oxford: Legenda, 2003), 1–2.
Jonathan P. Rosman, MD and Phillip J Resnick, MD, report that of the 122 cases they studied, out of the true necrophiles 15 percent were motivated by the “attempt to gain comfort, or to overcome feelings of isolation” (159). The authors also note that in modern culture necrophilia has been associated with cannibalism and myths of vampirism: ‘The vampire, who has been romanticized by the Dracula tales, obtains a feeling of power from his victims, ‘like I had taken something powerful from them.’ ” See Jonathan P. Rosman, MD and Phillip J Resnick, MD, “Sexual Attraction to Corpses: A Psychiatric Review of Necrophilia” in The Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law Vol. 17, No.2, 1989, 153–163; 153 citing vanden Bergh RL, Kelly JF: ‘Vampirism: a Review with New Observations’. Arch Gen Psychiatry 11: 543–7, 1964.
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© 2011 Georgina Colby
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Colby, G. (2011). Missing Persons: Melancholy as Symptom in Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction and The Informers. In: Bret Easton Ellis. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339163_2
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