Abstract
Imperial Bedrooms, published in 2010 on the cusp of a new decade, ushers the reader into an uneasy narrative and cultural space. Ellis’s second novel of the twenty-first century was written and marketed as a sequel to his first novel, Less Than Zero. Imperial Bedrooms does not, however, function straightforwardly as a literary continuation. Rather, it is a complex remake of the original book. Structural similarities to the first book point to this complicated fusion of sequel and remake. Set two decades after Less Than Zero, Clay has returned from New York to Los Angeles for four months. The characters are indeed older. Yet the names of the characters, the Los Angeles setting, and the architecture of the novel (short sections written in minimalist prose); function to create a narrative that appears to be a self-reflexive echo of Less Than Zero. The architecture of the novel constitutes a reconstructive narratological framework. For Ellis, this reconstructive technique is one aspect of the novel that is fundamental to his act of underwriting the politics of America in the period 2003 to 2009.
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Notes
Noam Chomsky, “Terror and Just Response” in Terrorism and International Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 75.
Neil Smith, “After the American Lebensraum: ‘Empire,’ Empire and Globalization’ in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 2003, 249.
Leo Panitch, “September 11 and the American Empire,” in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 2003, 235.
David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 9.
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 2006), 53.
Neil Smith, “Prologue” in American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), xi.
Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (London: Women’s Press, 1980).
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© 2011 Georgina Colby
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Colby, G. (2011). CODA: The Politics of Exposure: Unsafe Lines and Narratives of Conflict in Imperial Bedrooms . In: Bret Easton Ellis. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339163_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339163_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-29776-4
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