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Article Dans Une Revue Groupe de Recherches Anglo-Américaines de Tours Année : 2009

Reading the Body in Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho (1991)

David Roche

Résumé

This article examines how matter, in Ellis's scandalous novel, is read according to the texts that inform the yuppie's etiquette, labeling the body as either “healthy” or “unhealthy.” Basing his argumentation on the works of Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, Jacques Lacan, Clément Rosset and D.W. Winnicott, the author argues that the body is perceived as a sign of something when it is actually an effect of the signifier, and that the novel's excess makes the invisible workings of what Michel Foucault called “power” extremely visible. The novel thus undermines the yuppie/psychopath-narrator's essentialist quest. Indeed, the psychopath attempts to delve into the (often female) body in quest of meaning that would be beyond the textual and the intertextual, in quest of matter that would not matter, so to speak, only to reveal that signs are merely effects of signifiers, and that there is no true self, only a series of false selves. In the end, reading the novel is no more cathartic for the reader than acting like a serial killer is for the yuppie, there being no exit from American Psycho, the text. The reader can merely put the novel back on the shelf, just as the psychopath stores the bodies of his victims.

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halshs-00451731 , version 1 (06-09-2010)

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  • HAL Id : halshs-00451731 , version 1

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David Roche. Reading the Body in Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho (1991): Confusing Signs and Signifiers. Groupe de Recherches Anglo-Américaines de Tours, 2009, 5 (1), pp.124-38. ⟨halshs-00451731⟩
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