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From Bateman to Rat Man: American Psycho's unnatural selections
This chapter reads Bret Easton Ellis’s slasher satire American Psycho (1991) as a novel about the displacement of affects in capitalism. Using ideas from evolutionary psychology alongside writers on economy and psychoanalysis, this chapter investigates how structures of feeling in the finance economy of the narrative are both symptomatic and constitutive of the capital relationship—hiding the truth as well as facilitating lies. Patrick Bateman, Ellis’s financier protagonist and serial killer, becomes the horror hidden in plain sight that we all experience and yet repress in our everyday world.
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Publication status
- Published
File Version
- Published version
Publisher
Palgrave MacmillanExternal DOI
Page range
781-802Pages
883.0Book title
The Palgrave handbook of affect studies and textual criticismPlace of publication
New YorkISBN
9783319633039Department affiliated with
- English Publications
Research groups affiliated with
- Sussex Centre for American Studies Publications
Full text available
- No
Peer reviewed?
- Yes
Editors
Thomas Blake, Donald R WehrsLegacy Posted Date
2018-10-24First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date
2018-10-23Usage metrics
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