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.