Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

are responsible for provoking the most vehement responses to American Psycho, they are
not the perverse projections of a deranged author, nor are they designed solely to fuel the
misogynistic fantasies of a small contingent of male readers. They are the result of
careful crafting and within the framework of transgression they serve a precise and
specific aim. By remaining in step with the overall narrative style of the novel, these
scenes project the reader to the forefront of the action and intend to provoke a sensation
of horror. As I established in the previous chapter, it is by feeling this visceral type of
response that the act of reading becomes an experience in itself.
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A parallel can be established relating the dichotomies of Terror vs. Horror and
serious sexual content vs. Pornography. Like Horror, the aim of Pornography is also to
create some type of physical reaction on the part of the reader, which contributes in
creating that rapprochement between language and experience which Bataille considers
an intrinsic property of transgression. As argued previously, the major difference
between Terror and Horror is that, while the former aims for intellectual speculation (as
Radcliffe argued), the latter elicits some type of visceral response, a physical reaction.
Similarly, the difference between serious Sexual Content and Pornography is that while
the former elicits some type of intellectual contemplation, the latter aims, more
specifically, to arouse its audience. Pornography aims to fascinate the reader by
triggering a sensation of physical excitement and/or pleasure, which can be scopophilic.
And while in contrast to Horror this reaction is by no means repulsive, it is nonetheless a
physical response. In other words, although the reactions elicited by Horror and
Pornography contrast in the sense that while the reaction elicited by the former is visceral
and repulsive and the response to the latter is non-visceral and fascinating, both are