Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

INTRODUCTION
If one looks at the moments in history when
literary works toppled the taboos of the ruling
morals or offered the reader new solutions for
the moral casuistry of his lived praxis, which
thereafter could be sanctioned by the
consensus of all readers in the society then a
still-little-studied area of research opens itself
up to the literary historian.
Hans Robert Jauss, Literary History
as a Challenge to Literary Theory
Literary works that question ruling conventions by shocking their audiences and
arousing controversy are frequently dubbed “transgressive.” They are often regarded as
potentially subversive by institutional authorities because they transgress social and/or
cultural taboos and prohibitions. More specifically, it appears that these prohibitions—
and the inclination to violate them—are commonly related to the natural drives of sex and
aggression, and transgressive works typically depict these instincts in gruesome and
abhorrent ways.
In the two texts chosen for this study, Matthew Lewis’ The Monk and Bret Easton
Ellis’ American Psycho, both widely considered transgressive, these drives are
graphically literalized in explicit accounts of sex and violence. By depicting these social
taboos, both Lewis and Ellis not only challenged the social guidelines that govern these
moral prohibitions, their publication has also spurred major controversy, which
contributed to positioning them in the annals of literary history next to other scandalous
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