Riddled with intertextual references and notorious for their explicit portrayal of sex, drugs, and the occasional rock 'n' roll, the novels of Bret Easton Ellis reveal many layers. The novels are often accused of not making sense--but they instead make many senses. Their semantic complexity is obvious when put under a theoretical lens as provided by Jacques Derrida. His semiotic analysis, which focuses on the instability of meaning and is shaped by key terms such as differance, the trace, and the supplement, offers the ideal framework to look behind Ellis's obsession with surfaces. Aimed at aficionados of Ellis's works as well as students of contemporary American fiction and literary theory, this book discusses the central issues in Ellis's novels through 2019 and offers a new perspective for the practical use of Derrida's ideas. In order to ensure accessibility, a theoretical chapter introduces all the concepts necessary to understand a Derridean analysis of Ellis's fiction. As Rip says in Imperial Bedrooms: "It means so many things, Clay."

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!

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Siegen (FB 3 (Literatur-, Srach- und Medienwissenschaften)), course: „Postmodern Fiction“, language: English, abstract: With the attention-grabbing novel "American Psycho" Bret Easton Ellis entered quite a dangerous ground. The bizarre mixture of yuppie satire and splatter horror caused reactions of scathing criticism, indignation, yes, even murder threat. As a consequence, the publishing house that had the first contract with Ellis and was supposed to edit the novel, namely Simon & Schuster, responded to this radical refusal and cancelled the deal already made. This decision, not to publish a book due to the negative responds against it, meant another scandal since it was a sensation in the American publishing business. Anyway, brushing aside all moral standards, Ellis’ shocker was published in 1991 by Vintage books, and for a while, the young writer became the “meistgehaßte[...] Autor der Welt” – evidently, because critics considered his narration too pornographic, sexist, anti-women, disgusting, boring and beyond belief. Yet, American Psycho was regarded with interest – probably last but not least because Bret Easton Ellis had been celebrated as a great talent when publishing "Less than Zero". Meanwhile, countless studies with many diverging approaches manifest that American Psycho may not be condemned and dismissed as a pure splatter work glorifying violence. There are works analysing the publication and the reception of the novel as well as the socio-cultural background; other studies focus on content and stylistic device , or on the motif of the serial killer as postmodern anti-hero. Additionally, some special analyses examine the position of the novel within the American history of censorship or even attempt to draw a parallel from Ellis’ Bateman to Goethe’s Faust. Thus, it is substantiated that the interest in "American Psycho" has spread widely and quickly. And still, 15 years after its publication the ambiguous novel, which was, besides, brought to screen in 2000, offers many subjects of discussion. The aim of this paper is to analyse in what way and to what extent Ellis’ work is distinctive for the period of literary postmodernism. Definitively, there are several innovative and scandalous stratagies applied in "American Psycho", but are these devices really symptomatic for a postmodern perception? To answer a question like that, first of all, an essential condition is of course a definition of postmodern terms. [...]

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.

Within popular culture studies, one finds discussions about quantitative sociology, Marxism, psychoanalysis, myth criticism, feminism, and semiotics, but hardly a word on the usefulness of phenomenology, the branch of philosophy concerned with human experience. In spite of this omission, there is a close relationship between the aims of phenomenology and the aims of popular culture studies, for both movements have attempted to redirect academic study toward everyday lived experience. The fifteen essays in this volume demonstrate the way in which phenomenological approaches can illuminate popular culture studies, and in so doing they take on the entire range of popular culture.

The New York Times bestselling author of American Psycho and Less Than Zero delivers a gripping and brilliant dissection of our celebrity obsessed culture. • “Arguably the novel of the 1990’s…Should establish Ellis as the most ambitious and fearless writer of his generation…a must read.” —The Seattle Times Set in 90s 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. He's living with one beautiful model and having an affair with another on the eve of opening the trendiest nightclub in New York City history. And now it's time to move to the next stage. But the future he gets is not the one he had in mind. With the same deft satire and savage wit he has brought to his other fiction, Bret Ellis gets beyond the facade and introduces us, unsparingly, to what we always feared was behind it. Glamorama shows us a shadowy looking-glass reality, the juncture where fame and fashion and terror and mayhem meet and then begin to resemble the familiar surface of our lives. Look for Bret Easton Ellis’s new novel, The Shards!

In New York in the middle of the twentieth century, comic book companies figured out how to make millions from comics without paying their creators anything. In San Francisco at the start of the twenty-first century, tech companies figured out how to make millions from online abuse without paying its creators anything. In the 1990s, Adeline drew a successful comic book series that ended up making her kind-of famous. In 2013, Adeline aired some unfashionable opinions that made their way onto the Internet. The reaction of the Internet, being a tool for making millions in advertising revenue from online abuse, was predictable. The reaction of the Internet, being part of a culture that hates women, was to send Adeline messages like 'Drp slut ... hope u get gang rape.' Set in a San Francisco hollowed out by tech money, greed and rampant gentrification, I Hate the Internet is a savage indictment of the intolerable bullshit of unregulated capitalism and an uproarious, hilarious but above all furious satire of our Internet Age.

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!

For many years, Elizabeth Young has been one of the few critics in England to champion new writing and the avant-garde. Pandora's Handbag is a unique combination of autobiography, commentary, published journalism and writer's guide for would-be Arts journalists. A riveting read, the book contains revealing interviews with Herbert Huncke, Jayne County, Dennis Cooper, Edward Gorey and Poppy Z. Brite, amongst others. o Flyer Mailing to American fiction departments o Ad in The Nation Elizabeth Young is a critic, arts journalist, and the co-author of Shopping in Space: Essays on American "Blank Generation" Fiction published by Grove Atlantic.

'Lovers and Knowers' discusses the development of the American cultural Left in the twentieth century. Seeking to contribute to the discussion of the relation between American Studies and the field of theory, the book focuses on the analysis of a specific theoretical problem. It attempts to elucidate the multilayered complexity of the relation between antifoundationalists and foundationalists, antitheorists and theorists, and (liberal) ironists and metaphysicians. Proposing the idea of an antifoundationalist and antiessentialist worldly and oppositional criticism, the study argues that it is possible to develop a postmetaphysical thinking whose notion of the political and whose understanding of the function of literary and cultural criticism clearly differ from those suggested by neopragmatists such as Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish. It is demonstrated that Cornel West's leftist version of neopragmatism, striving for consequences of theory in history, ought to be regarded as an oppositional and worldly criticism (in the Saidian sense) which dialectically uses the insights of (neo)pragmatist antifoundationalism.