Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

violence to our inner selves, are we able to bear a negation that carries us to the farthest
bounds of possibility?” (Erotism 24).
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In light of the controversy surrounding the publication of American Psycho, the
protagonist’s misogynistic, pornographic, and sadistic narrative clearly transgressed the
accepted conventions of decency and the morality of polite society. Yet as mentioned
numerous times, it belongs to a well-established tradition of literary works that were also
condemned for breaking social taboos, and in the context of postmodern society it seems
surprising to witness a work of written fiction arousing so much controversy when
images of violent and sexual behavior form an integral part of the socio-cultural
landscape. Can American Psycho be considered to challenge artistic conventions?
Perhaps not in the same way that Sade, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Joyce, and possibly Lewis
did. Why not? On the one hand, the novel borrows extensively from the American
literary canon of the twentieth century 30 and, on the other, it is deeply embedded in the
tradition of Postmodernism, which is partly characterized by the continuous interchanges
between high and low forms of cultural production (such as, in Ellis’ case, the
heteroglossia of speeches ranging from music reviews, instructions manuals, mail-order
catalogues, and pornography). Nevertheless, it does stand out in comparison to other
contemporary works, partly because he pushes pastiche to radical extremes, and partly
because this type of extremist literature does not usually belong to the New York Times
bestseller list. In similar ways to what Lewis did to the late eighteenth century romance,
by almost exclusively structuring American Psycho around the speeches of popular
culture, Ellis explodes the boundaries of sanctioned exchanges between “popular” and
30 Murphet for example, cites Ernest Hemingway and Joan Didion as notable influences (12).