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New Approaches to the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel pp 297–315Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

The Limits of Fictional Ontologies in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

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Abstract

Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) exemplify different ways of questioning the demarcation of fictional modes of being. Ellis’ novel systematically ruins the worth of literary ontologies in their own reason-of-being by undercutting the separation of fiction from other social modes of being, especially from capitalist economy. In American Psycho, the plasticity of the aesthetic experience is reduced to an unproductive tremble between apathy and the hyper-sensitive expectation for more and more of the same horror to come. Never Let Me Go on the other hand creates a literary ethology that is able to re-animate the mechanisms of social recognition so as to envision novel modes of conviviality and cohabitation beyond the traditional categorizations and evaluations of life.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For a general overview on New Materialism, cf. Dolphijn and van der Tuin (2012).

  2. 2.

    For this usage of the term ‘actor,’ cf. Latour (2005). Based on Latour, Rita Felski has recently suggested reading literature as “a coproduction between actors rather than an unraveling of manifest meaning, a form of making rather than unmaking” (2015, 12); the works of Marielle Macé (2011, 2013) and Yves Citton (2007) follow a similar bearing.

  3. 3.

    For the concept of crossing individual modes of existence as opposed to their mere amalgamation, cf. Latour (2013); the concepts of cultural negotiation and circulation are, of course, derived from New Historicism (Greenblatt 1988).

  4. 4.

    For the following, cf. Derrida’s general remarks on Baudelaire’s poème en prose ‘Counterfeit Coin’ in the third chapter of Given Time (1992, 71–107).

  5. 5.

    For this use of the term ‘limit,’ cf. Derrida (1993).

  6. 6.

    For this simile, cf. Latour (2013, 248).

  7. 7.

    My thanks for this quote as well as for the subsequent notion of Kathy’s remembrance go to Maria Ostrovskaya.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English, University of Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Roger Lüdeke

  2. Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Roger Lüdeke

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  1. Roger Lüdeke
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Correspondence to Roger Lüdeke .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. English Literatures and Cultures, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany

    Sibylle Baumbach

  2. Anglophone Literatures, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Birgit Neumann

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Lüdeke, R. (2019). The Limits of Fictional Ontologies in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. In: Baumbach, S., Neumann, B. (eds) New Approaches to the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32598-5_16

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