Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

“serious” literature as prescribed in American literary culture. Without a doubt this was
the opinion of Rosenblatt and Manguel when they so vehemently trashed Ellis’ novel in
their reviews and essays. Yet the discussion above highlights how Ellis’ stylistic and
dialectic choices are contingent to his overall purpose to satirize Western contemporary
culture. In a way, Ellis responds to Adorno’s observation regarding the hypocritical
duality of the culture industry:
Works of art are ascetic and unashamed; the culture industry is
pornographic and prudish. Love is downgraded to romance. And,
after the descent, much is permitted; even license as a marketable
specialty has its quota bearing the trade description “daring.” The
mass production of the sexual automatically achieves its
repression. (1231)
While it could be argued that American Psycho precisely corresponds to what the
Frankfurt school critic describes as a “marketable specialty,” it is quite the opposite. On
the one hand, the novel was never labeled to be “daring”—at the most it was considered
to be so because of the controversy surrounding its publication—and on the other, Ellis’
agenda echoes that of Adorno’s, for it is also the purpose of the novel to condemn the
ideology of the culture industry, as it brainwashes its subjects by coercing them in a cycle
of mindless consumption.
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What is to be made, then, of the likes of Rosenblatt who are of the opinion that
Ellis’ novel is pure trash (i.e. transgression for transgression’s sake), which implies that
they have overlooked and/or rejected its satirical edge and social criticism? Obviously,
for these individuals, the novel has clearly transgressed their norms, their views of what
is deemed acceptable to be distributed and circulated, their cultural ideologies.
“American Psycho was a dangerous book,” declared Young (89), yet it was and remains