Symbolic Consumption and Media in Bret Easton Ellis’s Less than Zero

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Department of English Language and Literature, Islamic Azad University, Central Tehran Branch, Tehran, Iran

2 Associate Professor, Department of English Language and Literature and Linguistics, University of Kurdistan, Sanandaj, Iran

10.34785/J014.2021.813

Abstract

The present paper seeks to argue that consumption and media wield an unparalleled influence over contemporary American society, in a way that these drives constitute the primary means through which identity is constituted. Closely referring to Jean Baudrillard’s critical concepts, the present research contends that the fictional characters of Bret Easton Ellis, particularly in Less Than Zero, are prone to this postmodern world, where all experience via consumption has become fathomless, and traditional notions of identity have been changed. Ellis’s characters oscillate between the extreme poles of violence and ennui as they do their best to prevent their psyches from collapse amidst the surrounding turmoil caused by excessive consumption. Neither one of these alternatives results in any relief. In this type of literature, the protagonists are immersed in the contemporary world of consumption and the mass media. The primary interest here is on the effects of this immersion in the world of commodities on the major characters (Clay and Blair), and their reactions in the selected novel. Accordingly, dependence on possessions by the characters of the novel in order to isolate themselves from the threatening disorder of the post-modern world is the major concern of present study of the novel.

Keywords


Annesley, James. Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel. London: Pluto Press, 1998.
Baudrillard, Jean. Consumer Society. Intro. George Ritzer. London: Sage, 1998. Print.
---. For a Critique of Political Economy of the Sign. London: Sage, 1993. Print.
---. The Mirror of Production. Tr. Mark Poster. New York: Telos, 1 975. Print.
---. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 1994.print.
---. Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988.Print.
---. Symbolic Exchange and Death. Trans. I. H. Grant. London: Sage, 1993. Print.
---. The System of Objects. Ed. Mark Poster. London: Sage, 1998. Print.
---. “The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media.” Trans, Marie Maclean. New Literary History, vol.16. No. 3(spring 1985), pp.577-89. Print.
Bocock, Robert. Consumption. London: Routledge, 1993. Print.                              
Baelo-Allue, Sonia. Bret Easton Ellis’s Controversial Fiction: Writing between High and Low Culture. Bloomsbury Academic: Continuum Literary Studies, 2012.
Boorstin, Daniel. Democracy and Its Discontents: reflections on Everyday America. New York: Random House, 1971.
Bottomore, T. and Rubel, M. Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and SocialPhilosophy. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971. Print.                                                                                                                        
Colby, Georgina. Bret Easton Ellis: Underwriting the Contemporary. New York: Palgrave, 2011.
Cummings, Ray. “Bret Easton Ellis, and Why You Shouldn’t Hate Him (Not Right Away,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Anyway)”. http://www. Ennui.clara.net/ellis/rc.html [accessed on July 12, 2017] Ellis, Bret Easton. Less Than Zero. London: Picador. 1984.Freese, Peter. “Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero: Entropy in the ‘MTV Novel’?” in Korte, Barbara; Nischik, Reingard M. Modes of Narrative: Approaches to American, Canadian, and British Fiction. Koningshausen: Warzburg, 1990.
Gerard, Nicci. “Bret and the Beast in the Corner”. The Observer (16 October, 1994): Life 14.Grossberg, Lawrence. We Gotta Get Out Of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.
James, Henry. The American. New York: Everyman Paperbacks, 1997.print.
Jameson, Fredrick. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Capitalism. New York: Verso, 1991.
Kinder, Marsha. “Music Video and the Spectator”. Film Quarterly, Vol.38, no.1 (1985): 2-15.Kroker, Robert Phillip. A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman.    New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
McInerney, Jay. Manhattan Transfer. New York: Penguin, 1993. Print. McLuhan, Marshall. The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967.
Mookerjee, Robin. Transgressive Fiction: The New Satiric Tradition. New York: Palgrave Mac Millan, 2013.
Murphet, Julian. Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum, 2001.
Saltzman, Arthur. Designs of Darkness in Contemporary Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990.
Young, Elizabeth and Graham Caveney. Shopping in Space: Essays on American Blank Generation Fiction. New York and London: Serpent’s Tail, 1992.