scholarly journals Existential Thought in American Psycho and Fight Club

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Stephen Wenley
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Strong Basis ◽  
Bret Easton Ellis ◽  
Existential Crisis ◽  
Violent Content ◽  
The Social ◽  
Quest For Meaning ◽  
Fight Club ◽  
French Intellectuals

<p>Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho (1991) and Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club (1996) demonstrate a strong basis in existential thought. Both novels reference the philosophical and literary works of Sartre and Camus—two French intellectuals associated with the midtwentieth- century movement existentialism—as well as existentialism’s nineteenth-century antecedents Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche. More importantly, American Psycho and Fight Club also modify the philosophy and its expression, incorporating postmodern satire, graphically violent content, and the Gothic conventions of "the double" and "the unspeakable", in order to update existential thought to suit the contemporary milieu in which these texts were produced. This new expression of existential thought is interlaced with the social critique American Psycho and Fight Club advance, particularly their satirical accounts of the vacuous banality of modern consumer culture and their disturbing representations of the repression and violent excesses ensuing from the crisis of masculinity. The engagement with existentialism in these novels also serves a playful function, as Ellis and Palahniuk frequently subvert the philosophy, keeping its idealism secondary to their experiments with its implications within the realm of fiction, emphasising the symptoms of existential crisis, rather than the resolution of the ontological quest for meaning. While these two novels can be considered existential in relation to the tradition of classic existentialist texts, they also represent a distinctive development of existential fiction—one that explores the existential condition of the postmodern subject at the end of the twentieth century.</p>

scholarly journals Existential Thought in American Psycho and Fight Club

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Stephen Wenley
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Strong Basis ◽  
Bret Easton Ellis ◽  
Existential Crisis ◽  
Violent Content ◽  
The Social ◽  
Quest For Meaning ◽  
Fight Club ◽  
French Intellectuals

<p>Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho (1991) and Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club (1996) demonstrate a strong basis in existential thought. Both novels reference the philosophical and literary works of Sartre and Camus—two French intellectuals associated with the midtwentieth- century movement existentialism—as well as existentialism’s nineteenth-century antecedents Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche. More importantly, American Psycho and Fight Club also modify the philosophy and its expression, incorporating postmodern satire, graphically violent content, and the Gothic conventions of "the double" and "the unspeakable", in order to update existential thought to suit the contemporary milieu in which these texts were produced. This new expression of existential thought is interlaced with the social critique American Psycho and Fight Club advance, particularly their satirical accounts of the vacuous banality of modern consumer culture and their disturbing representations of the repression and violent excesses ensuing from the crisis of masculinity. The engagement with existentialism in these novels also serves a playful function, as Ellis and Palahniuk frequently subvert the philosophy, keeping its idealism secondary to their experiments with its implications within the realm of fiction, emphasising the symptoms of existential crisis, rather than the resolution of the ontological quest for meaning. While these two novels can be considered existential in relation to the tradition of classic existentialist texts, they also represent a distinctive development of existential fiction—one that explores the existential condition of the postmodern subject at the end of the twentieth century.</p>

Spaces of Consumption in American Literary Realism

2019 ◽  
pp. 391-410
Author(s):  
Gary Totten
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
New Strategies

This chapter discusses how consumer culture affects the depiction and meaning of the natural world in the work of American realist writers. These writers illuminate the relationship between natural environments and the social expectations of consumer culture and reveal how such expectations transform natural space into what Henri Lefebvre terms “social space” implicated in the processes and power dynamics of production and consumption. The representation of nature as social space in realist works demonstrates the range of consequences such space holds for characters. Such space can both empower and oppress individuals, and rejecting or embracing it can deepen moral resolve, prompt a crisis of self, or result in one’s death. Characters’ attempts to escape social space and consumer culture also provide readers with new strategies for coping with their effects.

Naive, connected, and counselor tween girl identity groups: Consumption practices and social identity constructions within consumer culture

2021 ◽  
pp. 146954052110160
Author(s):  
Tiziana Brenner Beauchamp Weber ◽  
Eliane C. Francisco Maffezzolli
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
Social Identity Theory ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Social Group ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Consumer Identity ◽  
Identity Constructions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Consumption Practices ◽  
Identity Groups

This research identifies the relationship between consumption practices and the construction of social identity among tweens in a Brazilian context. Using consumer culture theory and social identity theory, we employed 80 h of observation, 9 interviews, and projective techniques with fifteen girls. Three social identity groups were acknowledged: naive, connected, and counselors. These groups revealed different identity projects, such as the integration and maintenance within the social group of current belonging, the access to the social group with the greater distinctions, the generation of differentiable and positive distinctions (both intra- and intergroups), and the expression and consolidation of identity and its respective consumption practices. This research contributes to the consumption literature that relates to consumer identity projects. The findings reveal a current resignification of girlhood and exposes tweens’ consumption practices as a direct mechanism of the expression and construction of their social identities. These are mechanisms of social identity construction as mediated by group relations through the processes of access, maintenance, integration, differentiation, and distinction.

Why do crowds cause trouble? Exploring affective instability in collectivity

2021 ◽  
pp. 147059312110349
Author(s):  
Maíra Magalhães Lopes ◽  
Joel Hietanen ◽  
Jacob Ostberg
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Sao Paulo ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
São Paulo ◽  
Urban Activism ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Expression ◽  
Affective Instability ◽  
Being And Becoming

Through our ethnographic study of urban activism collectives in São Paulo, we propose another approach for exploring the process of collective formations and their longevity. Rather than seeking out the representational meanings of individualized communities, we approach collectivity from the perspective of crowds. Crowds are affective. Crowds are contagious. By adopting affect-based theorizing, we discuss affective intensities that bring about collectivity before the individuals awaken to narrate their meaning-makings. In our ethnographic context, collectives resist manifestations of gentrification (i.e., consumer culture in itself) and offer us a multifaceted site of being and becoming with the crowds. We explore how connections and disconnections affectively rekindle the social expression of collective bodies in consumer culture. This way, we add new dimensions to extant theorizing of consumer collectivity that tends to focus on individualized meaning, stability, and harmony.

Private Writings

2021 ◽  
pp. 62-75
Author(s):  
Caroline Pollentier
Keyword(s):  
New Technologies ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
The Social ◽  
Micro Power

This chapter examines Virginia Woolf’s private writings as ethical and political technologies of privacy. In the light of Michel Foucault’s ethics of self-writing, Woolf’s notebooks, letters, and diaries are read as various ‘techniques of living’ rehearsing an elusive tension between immediacy and self-consciousness. The chapter considers in turn the archival impulse of her notebooks, the pragmatics of intimacy at work in her letters, and the aesthetics of daily life outlined in her diaries. Through these daily ‘notes’, Woolf configured various acts of self-making ranging from social critique to psychological immunity. She was also keenly aware of the extent to which her daily ‘scribbling’ or ‘scratching’ was becoming increasingly entangled with new technologies of recording and communication. By relating these archaic media to the social rise of ‘the very private’ in modernity, Woolf mobilized her private writings as untimely techniques of resistance, generating founding, if vulnerable, forms of micro-power.

Muriel Spark's Early Fiction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Stage Play ◽  
Insight Into

This book presents a detailed critical analysis of a period of significant formal and thematic innovation in Muriel Spark’s literary career. Spanning the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, it identifies formative instances of literary experimentation in texts including The Comforters, The Driver’s Seat and The Public Image, with an emphasis on metafiction and the influence of the nouveau roman. As the first critical study to draw extensively on Spark’s vast archives of correspondence, manuscripts and research, it provides a unique insight into the social contexts and personal concerns that dictated her fiction. Offering a distinctive reappraisal of Spark’s fiction, the book challenges the rigid critical framework that has long been applied to her writing. In doing so, it interrogates how Spark’s literary innovations work to facilitate moments of subversive satire and gendered social critique. As well as presenting nuanced re-readings major works like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, it draws unprecedented attention to lesser-discussed texts such as her only stage play, Doctors of Philosophy, and early short stories.

Youth-Led REP: Building Critical Consciousness for Social Change

2004 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-50
Author(s):  
Jonathan London ◽  
Melissa Chabrán
Keyword(s):  
Action Research ◽  
Research Evaluation ◽  
Popular Education ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Participatory Action ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Empowerment Evaluation ◽  
Community Based Research ◽  
The Social

If knowledge is a form of power, then to lack knowledge is to lack power, and to build knowledge is to build power. This seemingly basic notion is at the source of diverse streams of theory and practice entitled participatory action research, community-based research, counter mapping, popular education and empowerment evaluation. It is from these historical, political and methodological headwaters that a relatively new stream of work, called youth-led action research, evaluation and planning, arises. These practices, while distinct, all represent attempts to build the power and capacity of those at the margins of society to examine, define, and ultimately shape their worlds according to their needs, visions and values. Youth-led action research, evaluation and planning expands the social critique and progressive stance towards breaking the monopolies of power/knowledge to include age-based inequities, along with (and in relationship to) inequities based on race, ethnicity, class gender, sexuality and other markers of difference.

Tone, Genre, and the Actor’s Director

2020 ◽  
pp. 49-67
Author(s):  
Elyce Rae Helford
Keyword(s):  
Central Character ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Romantic Comedy ◽  
The Social ◽  
Gender Presentation ◽  
The Impact

Tone and genre significantly affect gender presentation within the course of a highly productive decade in Cukor’s career. The Women (1939), Susan and God (1940), and Edward, My Son (1949) are all films based on plays originally written as satire or parody. They become more complicated productions when adapted for film by “actor’s director” Cukor. By emphasizing earnest and dramatic portrayals of heavily gender-normative portrayals, the director shifts both the tone and the impact of the satirical films. In The Women, the serious, sympathetic central character detracts from the social critique of wealthy, catty wives. Susan and God shifts from romantic comedy to melodrama and holds the wife character to account for the confines of conventional marriage, excising potential social critique. Finally, Edward, My Son, one of Cukor’s major and more interesting failures, yields its satirical bite to the questionable casting and directing of its hypermasculine lead.

Bedrock or social construction? What Anthropocene science means for political theory

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 97-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel Arias-Maldonado
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Environmental Science ◽  
Scientific Concept ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Quest For Meaning ◽  
Natural Scientists

How should political thinkers deal with environmental science? The question has acquired a new urgency with the rise of the Anthropocene, a scientific concept rapidly assimilated by the social sciences and the humanities. In that respect, some critics have levelled against it the well-known objections that environmental political thinkers and philosophers have directed towards science at large in the past. Anthropocene science might lead towards planetary governmentality, imposing a reductive way of understanding both the planet and sustainability. This article will claim that a clear demarcation between scientific and sociopolitical enquiries is needed. Political thinkers should take the findings provided by natural scientists as the basis for normative exploration and the quest for meaning. Arendt’s reflections on truth and factfulness will help to make this point.

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