School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemStoried cities: Bret Easton Ellis and the urban literary tradition( 2016)This thesis is an attempt to re-classify the work of Bret Easton Ellis. It seeks to determine, through close textual analysis and with particular attention to the epigraphs and allusions he employs, whether “blank fiction” and Postmodernism adequately describe the ideological tradition of writing to which Ellis belongs. Noting the central role that the urban spaces of New York and Los Angeles occupy in Ellis’s oeuvre, it asks to what extent can the disturbed minds of his protagonists be seen as resulting from the alienating city environments in which they dwell, and can we ally Ellis’s project to the classical eighteenth and nineteenth-century urban literary texts he references? In reading against a prose style that invites its readers to skim, Ellis’s citations signal that he does not intend his novels to be merely a commentary upon adolescent apathy, 1980s capitalist greed, or 1990s celebrity obsession – the dominant critical interpretations of his key novels – but, in a vision far more closely aligned to classic urban novelists, as comments on the destructive and alienating nature of the city as a force acting upon the psyche of the individual. This thesis examines Ellis’s portrayals of the contemporary American city in order to reveal potential meaning behind what has been described as the unnecessarily graphic and sadistic levels of violence that characterise these works, and argues that Ellis occupies an uneasy position within the Postmodern era.
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Item‘Like a bird he looks upwards’: inarticulateness in fiction( 2010)This Creative Writing MA has two main components: a creative work and a dissertation. Both components grapple with the problems and possibilities of inarticulateness in fiction. The creative work comprises Part One of a novel, “The Yellow Jumper”, set in contemporary Australia. “The Yellow Jumper” is a work of poetic realism that begins with, and returns to, a man sitting in the gutter in front of his terrace in Sydney‘s Surry Hills, while an un-seasonal wintertime ‘Southerly Buster’ blows. This man, Simon Leary, finds himself increasingly unable to communicate with his girlfriend, Anna, and his best friend, Muz. He is also increasingly engrossed by memories of the Murray River, near which he grew up. The inarticulateness in “The Yellow Jumper” belongs to Simon: the prose foregrounds, without mimicking, his difficulties of expression. The dissertation begins with a prologue, “Clashing in the Gap”. This prologue outlines some of the stark contrasts between “The Yellow Jumper” and American Psycho, but also emphasises how a concern with inarticulateness underlies both works. However, in Ellis’ novel, inarticulateness is deliberately formal and modal, as well as being a trait possessed by the characters. The thesis, “Tapping the Gap: American Psycho and Inarticulateness,” is informed by contemporary satiric theory and Anglo-American moral philosophy. Cora Diamond’s work furnishes me with a way of thinking about the concept “inarticulateness” - a concept that the first chapter of the thesis is concerned to define in relation to literature, especially postmodern literature. The second chapter of the thesis telescopes in on the problems and possibilities of inarticulate satire. Here, I delineate the satiric mode, and then demonstrate how American Psycho invokes and disappoints satiric conventions. Both components view inarticulateness as a tool of which creative writers may make use. The gap between experience and expression is a difficult space to inhabit; it is also, I suggest, potentially a fertile space for the creative writer.