Copycat: Duplication and Creation in American Psycho and Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis
As the hypotext of Lunar Park (2005), American Psycho (1991) provides many interpretative keys to Bret Easton Ellis’s pseudo autobiographical work. In harmony with the playful spirit of postmodernism, the diegetic author behaves like the conjurers who disclose the tricks of their trade without dest...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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University of Ljubljana Press (Založba Univerze v Ljubljani)
2008-06-01
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| Series: | ELOPE |
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| Online Access: | https://journals.uni-lj.si/elope/article/view/3306 |
| Summary: | As the hypotext of Lunar Park (2005), American Psycho (1991) provides many interpretative keys to Bret Easton Ellis’s pseudo autobiographical work. In harmony with the playful spirit of postmodernism, the diegetic author behaves like the conjurers who disclose the tricks of their trade without destroying the essence of their magic. His universe is greatly identical to that of his fiction and the summaries of his preceding books duplicate the same text, thereby questioning the nature of creation. This paper starts by bringing to light Ellis’s conjuring tricks, before considering the relevance of a commodified persona in the context of a fin de siecle dominated by the emblematic figure of the yuppie as a grotesque dandy. The last part uses the final image of American Psycho and its transparent reference to one of Magritte’s most famous paintings in order to draw a parallel between Ellis’s creative process and the painter’s.
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| ISSN: | 1581-8918 2386-0316 |