Search

Contemporary American author Bret Easton Ellis has written seven novels, one collection of interrelated short stories, multiple screenplays, one long work of non-fiction, and a number of essays throughout the better part of the past four decades. In addition, in recent years, he has cultivated a significant online presence through social media, as well as a popular podcast. From the time of his debut novel, published while he was still an undergraduate student, until the present day, his works have been the subject of much scrutiny in terms of subject matter and style. Particularly in the case of the release of his best-known novel, American Psycho (1991), a good deal of the criticism of Ellis has shifted between the text and the public persona of the author himself. In typical postmodern style, this blurring of boundaries was not only welcomed, but frequently precipitated by Ellis, his publishers, and the public relations machinery at work on his behalf. The focus of the majority of this attention, self-perpetuated and otherwise, has been on the apparent element of evil at work in terms of the amorality of his characters and a corresponding lack of moral certitude. Firmly rooted in theoretical tradition established by Georges Bataille, as well as the work of numerous recent scholars, this project examines the squandering of youth and its damaging impact upon contemporary society as a consistent thread running through Bret Easton Ellis’s oeuvre, particularly in his characters’ pervasive drug use and conspicuous expression of sexuality. The trajectory of narrator-protagonist Clay, from isolated college student in Less Than Zero (1985) and The Rules of Attraction (1987) into savage narcissist in Imperial Bedrooms (2010) is a prime illustration of evil, as inherent in the familiar, throughout Ellis’s postmodern landscape. As opposed to presenting an external perpetrator of evil as a threat to an existing moral order, Ellis’s narrator reports on the evil at work in these young people’s daily lives. The reader, therefore, as this project contends, is placed in the uncomfortable, but imperative and at times voyeuristic, position of determining the extent of culpability for an entire society—one that is all too familiar.

Noah Hawley’s anthology series Fargo (FX, 2014- ) has received critical acclaim for its equally humorous and violent depiction of small-town delinquency. Participating in a range of criminal conflicts in and around Fargo, perpetrators are at the heart of the series’ thematic interest. However, Fargo self-reflexively deviates from classic crime and detective fiction schemes and rearranges generic conventions into a pastiche of cultural references. As I demonstrate in this article, the series’ playful rearrangement of familiar elements also affects the depiction of perpetrators. While the series features classic criminal characters such as hitmen and gang members, it is also interested in portraying previously blameless characters who gradually develop criminal potentials—characters who evolve from ordinary citizens to murderers, from oppressed to oppressors, from victims to perpetrators. I argue that the evolution of these unlikely villains is complemented by the choice of actors for the respective roles. The “recycling of the bodies of actors” is part of what Marvin Carlson has termed “ghosting” in theatre studies (The Haunted Stage 10). By interspersing reminiscences of some actors’ previous roles, Fargo deliberately activates the audience’s cultural memory to alienate them from established connotations and create new, uncommon villains. In this vein, the series prompts its audience to reflect on their own expectations that are based on cultural conventions and problematizes the issue of role-playing in the evolution of perpetrators both on a thematic and on a performative level.

In the media, the law, and public opinion, women who resort to violence within abusive relationships are often depicted as either victims or monsters. Nanette Burstein’s three-part docuseries, Killer Sally (2022), reexamines this binary which focuses on Sally McNeil, a former professional bodybuilder who murdered her husband, also a professional bodybuilder, in Southern California in 1995. Drawing on Belinda Morrissey’s When Women Kill and The Routledge International Handbook of Perpetrator Studies, this article argues that Burstein questions the discursive, performative, and one-sided dimensions of media and legal portrayals of female perpetrators. By placing both the perpetrator and the victim within complex socio-psychological and posthuman frameworks, Burstein broadens the discourse on battered women who kill by granting the perpetrator agency and voice.

Political clowns engage in statutory, cultural, and discursive crimes. While statutory crimes are available for litigation and resolution, cultural and discursive crimes are not. To comment and correct those actions, we turn to comedic clowns to police and parody political perpetrators. Those parodies and take-downs are clever, but they do not affect the behavior of the perpetrators, nor do they the result in the resolution of repetitive and stressful experience. Instead, those parodies produce familiarity, potential retraumatization, and coverage. The problem with clowns is that critical attention increases the reach of their influence and the assumption of their inevitability. This condition has hardened our political discourse and divisions and made it difficult to see civic enactments, such as elections, as productive or therapeutic in this age of cultural trauma. This article has four sections and a discussion. Part one discusses the clown as a perpetrator of discursive crimes. Part two explores how public commentaries on clownish political perpetrators both keep them in the public eye and excuse their actions as a joke. Part three focuses on how comedic response specifically repeats the discourse of perpetrators and runs the risk of retraumatizing their spectators. Part four examines how perpetrators employ self-clowning to invite derision and to delegitimize critique. The article will close with discussion of what currency we can find in the ideas of truth and reconciliation.

This essay performs a haptic reading of “The Whiteness of the Whale” chapter in Melville’s Moby-Dick. Following Ishmael’s way of “squeezing cases” and touching upon epistemological issues, it explores how Melville’s fiction dramatizes the affective, epistemological, and literary capabilities of touch. Discussing previous work on hapticality in Melville and building upon recent developments regarding the role of the senses in close reading, it starts by delineating the synesthetic tendencies of Melville’s fiction, in which seeing and touching, the impalpable and the palpable, are intermingled in the quest of a “visible truth.” It then examines how, in “The Whiteness of the Whale,” the visual becomes palpable. Indeed, through a singular, underlying focus on textures, Ishmael’s discourse on whiteness performs a simultaneous, equally valid though contradictory alternative to what it says, and a haptic reading of it enables us to squeeze a sense of touch out of this intensely visual chapter. It also highlights the problematic racial implications of a category that erases differences and promotes a semblance of pure, abstract whiteness. Reading the chapter’s famous final paragraph as a painting enables us to recover the haptic phenomenological quality of colors through their textures, which unsettles traditional readings that equate whiteness with terrifying emptiness. A true epistemology of touch in Melville is therefore to be found in the reconfiguration of seeing as touching—what I call a process of becoming-synesthetic, which is revelatory of what literature can feel like—rather than in a mere reversal of the hierarchy between the two senses. Ultimately, this essay highlights the importance of synesthesia in the singular dynamics of literary discourse and its impact on our ways of reading.

This article reflects on how street art helps to “queer” the city of Philadelphia. America’s sixth largest city has come to be known as the “City of Murals” following the initiative started by Mural Arts Philadelphia’s (MAP) Executive Director Jane Golden in 1987. It has also in recent years been re-branded as a queer city. Firstly, I consider how street art represents queer communities, drawing on human geographer Felix Driver’s paradigm of image-centred or “imaginative geography.” Based on a non-representational model of geography, I also reflect on how street art allows the queer community to constitute spaces for LGBTQIA+ people of colour. Philadelphia’s street art enables individual self-determination, as well as congregation, contestation, and conversation among queer people of colour, and between the queer and wider communities, in Philadelphia today. Following recent work on digital geographies of sexuality, a number of examples considered in this article focus on the power of digital media to re-purpose MAP’s murals and Philadelphia’s street art for queer purposes.

This article sets out to examine the ways in which Don DeLillo uses ekphrasis in his later novels to explore new modes of perceiving reality through screens; these perceptual modes allow readers to discover the effects produced by the hybridization of reality, and to experience how media and technological devices distort both the perception of time and experiential reality. The quality of perceptual experiences lies at the core of the writer’s aesthetics, which builds on the ability of language to convey the subjective perception of the characters, as well as the sensations and emotions that shape their mental lives and actively involve their sensing bodies, in an attempt to elicit readers’ empathic responses and their ethical engagement with the narrative contents. Unlike his novels published before 2000, where the presence of images leads to a phenomenon of hyperreality, DeLillo’s later fiction develops a rhetoric of seeing which gives rise to a reading experience that has the power to reveal the present to the readers. Readerly involvement resides, I argue, in the reader-cum-viewer position and the tension that develops from the interplay between the characters’ embodied act of seeing and the readers’ responses in relation to the narrative framing of the scene; the reading experience thus acquires emotional relevance. Reading, just as viewing, becomes a lived, embodied experience that allows readers to experience the characters’ subjective perception of time, and decide whether they feel with the characters or choose to block out empathic responses.

The founder of the Saturday Review of Literature, Henry Seidel Canby, had strong opinions about William Faulkner’s novels, to say the least. Sanctuary, especially, ignited his ire. In a scathing essay entitled “The School of Cruelty,” published in March 1931, Canby deplored what he perceived as the terrible situation of Southern writers, declaring Faulkner the figurehead of a so-called “American sadism.” “So it will be with this new sadism,” Canby wrote, “the novel cruelty by which the American scene with all its infinite shadings is made into something gross, sordid, or, as here, depraved with an ironic depravity in which the trivial by a kind of perversion becomes more horrible than professional evil.” Faulkner is expectedly not the only example of literature deemed “disgusting:” according to Chuck Palahniuk himself, seventy-three people have fainted during public readings of this short story “Guts.” Despite the writer’s obvious delight in describing in vivid detail the fainting spells he witnessed, this specific number is difficult to corroborate. However, numerous readers’ reviews on the popular website Goodreads.com indicate that Palahniuk’s assertions were not unfounded. One reviewer wrote: “I need to talk to someone about this book. I’m trying to digest it. I don’t know if it’s vile trash or provocative writing. It made me feel very strong emotions, which is usually a hallmark of good writing in my opinion, but the emotions were so, so unpleasant […]. I don’t know if my heart or stomach can handle the rest of the book. Is it worth it?” A good question indeed. How can a text, which relies on words on a page and not images, provoke such violent reactions? And finally, can a text be “digested”? Can there be any “pleasure of the text,” to use Roland Barthes’ expression, in the description of something “so, so unpleasant”? This paper is interested in the literary and aesthetic mechanisms enabling a profoundly somatic reading of fiction, especially in the violent experience of disgust, Faulkner’s Sanctuary, Samuel R. Delany’s Hogg and Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted. I will try to determine the aesthetic and political role disgust plays in these works, in order to prove that the physical unpleasantness caused by the experience of disgust forces readers to confront their societal conditioning by bringing them to the limits of readability.

Based on an analysis of the novel Infants of the Spring (1932), this article explores the circulation and metamorphoses of Black and queer cultural identities in the urban space of Harlem (New York) during the 1920s. In this roman à clef, Black American writer and editor Wallace Thurman revisited the experience of the Black bohemia. He did so focusing on the so-called “Niggeratti Manor,” a residence where some of the young Black artists of the Harlem Renaissance lived. At the time, New York was still organized along racially segregated lines and various factors were shaping the uptown neighborhood: the migration of Black Americans from the South to the North of the United States; the urban reforms that aimed to organize this migration; and the political, intellectual, and artistic production that accompanied the Black emancipation struggles. In addition, during this period, which was also that of Prohibition, white queer men and women patronized the neighborhood. On the one hand, Harlem was a fairly welcoming area for gay and lesbian people. On the other hand, it provided access to an entertainment world in which performance and camp were central. This article discusses how, using the metaphor of theater, and specifically the highly racially codified genre of the minstrel show, Infants of the Spring depicts male, Black, and queer identities in the modern urban landscape. Thurman’s novel interrogates the formation and circulation of these identities through the lens of the multiple relationships that Black artists had with white men, artists, and lovers, as well as with Black artists, intellectuals, and reformers.

This paper uses examples drawn from US cities (Midtown in Atlanta, Georgia, and Ybor City in Tampa, Florida) to develop a more generalizable framework within which to analyze the process of queering a neighborhood and identifying policy measures that might keep it queer. This kind of comparative approach enables a more careful reading of queer urban spaces based on the behaviors of LGBTQ people in and around those spaces. The strategic aim of these comparisons is to expand our understanding of queer spaces and to elaborate a more fluid model of queering cities. The paper uses a gravitational framework that identifies the centering (centripetal) and decentering (centrifugal) forces and the interplay between these forces. Each case provides different lessons for planners regarding the importance of either mitigating or exacerbating the centrifugal tendencies that so often threaten queer spaces. Because these forces are unique to each LGBTQ space, the analytic strategy provides for greater generalizability across different sizes of cities, across various cultural and ethnic areas, and a wider array of geographies.

Little Tulip (2014) is the third collaboration between US writer Jerome Charyn and French comic strip artist François Boucq. This graphic novel moves back and forth between the USSR of the 1940s and 1950s and New York City in the 1970s to tell the story of Paul, a US-born tattoo artist who spent his childhood in a Gulag colony in Siberia where, as Pavel, he learnt his craft. Drawing and tatooing are at the heart of the narrative, both Charyn and Boucq attempting to probe their powers: when Pavel/Paul becomes an artist in the Gulag, he learns to adorn captive bodies with insignia that reflect the strict hierarchy of the camp or with codified symbols that tell the stories of the criminals’ lives, but he also learns to penetrate those savage men’s personalities and thus to save his own skin by beautifully inking the skins of others. Beyond exposing the very concrete powers that enable the young tatoo artist to survive in Siberia by both respecting and transgressing the rules of the camp, and then to roam the violent streets of New York city, Little Tulip explores the laws of art that each drawing contains: rules that allow the artist to walk the thin line between art and magic, where the indelible ink of tatoo can paradoxically give birth to invisibility.

Cartoonists Alison Bechdel and Diane DiMassa, writing in a socially and culturally heteronormative context, give life to a fantasy: worlds that, instead of excluding dykes from public space, are entirely organized around lesbian characters. Both reflect the debates within lesbian feminist groups, the tensions between lesbian and straight feminists, and the strategies that can be deployed in the face of discrimination. They create utopian (Bechdel) and dystopian (DiMassa) universes that parallel and question contemporary US realities. DiMassa presents a caricatured, degraded version of US society, focusing on its relation to minorities, as seen through the eyes of a “homicidal lesbian terrorist” intent on reclaiming their right to exist in the world. Bechdel’s syndicated bi-monthly strip is a twenty-five-year running commentary on US politics viewed from a lesbian perspective, that also discusses such feminist and/or LGBTQ+ issues as gender relations, the sodomy laws, trans rights, marriage equality, etc., and that shows her characters evolving on a number of these issues, as many Americans have since the 1980s. For all their provocation and humor, these comics from the margins have remained eerily topical.

The French press was a crucial intermediary for the circulation of US literature in France during the 1940s. However, its role in this importing process has rarely been studied. Yet, the study of some forty journals (Combat, La Bataille, Action, Carrefour, Esprit...) confirms the construction of a “French taste” in American literature and suggests that the praise of American literary contributions was quickly criticized in periodicals with quite different editorial lines. Furthermore, it is in the press that some unknown mediators forged a critical discourse about a foreseeable influence of US texts on French writers: they were academics (Las Vergnas, Sigaux, Larnac), demanding aficionados (Beaumont, Blanzat, Fauchery, Hoog, Lalou, Morel), but also detractors of this importation (Henriot, Kanapa). The massive arrival of American literature in France did not create an ephemeral fever in the media. On the contrary, the French press scrutinized this American literary “moment” and addressed some fundamental questions, such as the reality of the American literary input or the advent of a literary massification caused by American influence.

Walter Farley’s stallion, Black, is certainly remembered as one of the most famous and beloved animals in Hachette’s Bibliothèque verte. The numerous titles in the “Black Stallion” series were reedited several times, and ultimately achieved high sales. The story of the introduction of the series in France in the aftermath of World War II, and its inclusion in this now-classic library of children’s texts, is largely unknown. Behind the scenes of the transatlantic negotiations, a narrative of complex, arduous discussions between author, series editor and agents unfolds, revealing the roles played by mediators usually forgotten by literary history. Based on archival evidence, this article develops a book history perspective to shed some light on these long negotiations that took place between 1941 and 1964.