“Of coyotes and werewolves: Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero”

IF 0.2 3区文学 0 LITERATURE

EXPLICATOR Pub Date : 2022-10-02 DOI:10.1080/00144940.2022.2164168

Todd Giles

{"title":"“Of coyotes and werewolves: Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero”","authors":"Todd Giles","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2022.2164168","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"To date, Bret Easton Ellis’ 1985 Less than Zero has understandably lacked an ecocritical reading due to its explicit depiction of sexual violence, over-thetop consumerism, rampant drug use, vapid characters, and crippling alienation. Ellis scholarship tends, in various ways, to examine LTZ as an exploration of the emptiness of our consumption-ridden mass-media world, whether it is Freese’s entropy and the “MTV novel” (1990), Sahlin’s “existential dilemma” (1991), Young’s exploration of place in a world without moral imperatives (1992), Annesley’s “blank fiction” (1988) and, most recently, Dehghan and Sadjadi’s Baudrillardian look at consumption and media (2021). However, when we consider the numerous references to the “wild” encroaching the boundaries protecting the carefully manufactured Garden of LA in the form of tree-felling winds, torrential rains, home-destroying mudslides, scorching temperatures, and cat-eating coyotes, Ellis’s novel can be read not only as a condemnation of constructing our Western Eden in the first place, but also as a point of contact for considering Clay’s (and our) place in the posthuman world. I argue that Clay, the novel’s narrator, finds himself adrift in a world where long-accepted distinctions between inside/outside and domesticated/wild are no longer tenable in an LA which, by the 1980s, had long since lost the farmland buffer that kept the wilds of desert and mountains at bay. Without this manufactured agricultural zone shielding metropolitan LA, a new space was created in which the perceived culture/nature boundaries are traversed, heightening Clay’s sense of alienation. These crossings are most prevalent where the wild and the urban intersect in areas of flux and transition known as ecotones. According to Irene Klaver, “An ecotone is an interface between two ecosystems and is often a more complex ecosystem by combining the previous two into a new third, with its own processes and species” (46). And, https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2164168","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"EXPLICATOR","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2164168","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE","Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Abstract

To date, Bret Easton Ellis’ 1985 Less than Zero has understandably lacked an ecocritical reading due to its explicit depiction of sexual violence, over-thetop consumerism, rampant drug use, vapid characters, and crippling alienation. Ellis scholarship tends, in various ways, to examine LTZ as an exploration of the emptiness of our consumption-ridden mass-media world, whether it is Freese’s entropy and the “MTV novel” (1990), Sahlin’s “existential dilemma” (1991), Young’s exploration of place in a world without moral imperatives (1992), Annesley’s “blank fiction” (1988) and, most recently, Dehghan and Sadjadi’s Baudrillardian look at consumption and media (2021). However, when we consider the numerous references to the “wild” encroaching the boundaries protecting the carefully manufactured Garden of LA in the form of tree-felling winds, torrential rains, home-destroying mudslides, scorching temperatures, and cat-eating coyotes, Ellis’s novel can be read not only as a condemnation of constructing our Western Eden in the first place, but also as a point of contact for considering Clay’s (and our) place in the posthuman world. I argue that Clay, the novel’s narrator, finds himself adrift in a world where long-accepted distinctions between inside/outside and domesticated/wild are no longer tenable in an LA which, by the 1980s, had long since lost the farmland buffer that kept the wilds of desert and mountains at bay. Without this manufactured agricultural zone shielding metropolitan LA, a new space was created in which the perceived culture/nature boundaries are traversed, heightening Clay’s sense of alienation. These crossings are most prevalent where the wild and the urban intersect in areas of flux and transition known as ecotones. According to Irene Klaver, “An ecotone is an interface between two ecosystems and is often a more complex ecosystem by combining the previous two into a new third, with its own processes and species” (46). And, https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2164168

查看原文本刊更多论文

“关于郊狼和狼人：布雷特·伊斯顿·埃利斯的《小于零》”

到目前为止，布雷特·伊斯顿·埃利斯（Bret Easton Ellis）1985年的《小于零》（Less than Zero）缺乏生态批判的阅读，这是可以理解的，因为它对性暴力、过度消费、猖獗的吸毒、乏味的角色和严重的异化进行了明确的描述。埃利斯的学术倾向于以各种方式将LTZ视为对我们消费猖獗的大众媒体世界空虚的探索，无论是弗里斯的熵和“MTV小说”（1990年）、萨林的“生存困境”（1991年）、杨对一个没有道德要求的世界中的位置的探索（1992年）、安妮斯利的“空白小说”（1988年），Dehghan和Sadjadi的Baudrillardian对消费和媒体的看法（2021）。然而，当我们考虑到“野生”以砍伐树木的风、暴雨、摧毁家园的泥石流、灼热的气温和吃猫的郊狼的形式侵占了保护精心制作的洛杉矶花园的边界时，埃利斯的小说不仅可以被解读为对建立我们的西部伊甸园的谴责，同时也是考虑克莱（以及我们）在后人类世界中的地位的一个联络点。我认为，小说的叙述者克莱发现自己漂泊在一个长期接受的内部/外部和驯化/野生之间的区别在洛杉矶已经站不住脚的世界里，到20世纪80年代，洛杉矶早已失去了阻止沙漠和山脉荒野的农田缓冲区。如果没有这个人造农业区来保护洛杉矶大都市，一个新的空间就被创造出来了，在这个空间里，感知到的文化/自然边界被跨越，这加剧了克莱的疏离感。这些交叉点在被称为交错带的流动和过渡地区的野生和城市交叉处最为普遍。根据Irene Klaver的说法，“交错带是两个生态系统之间的界面，通常是一个更复杂的生态系统，通过将前两者结合成具有自身过程和物种的新的第三个生态系统”（46）。和https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2164168

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

求助全文

约1分钟内获得全文求助全文

来源期刊

EXPLICATOR LITERATURE-

CiteScore

0.10

自引率

0.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： Concentrating on works that are frequently anthologized and studied in college classrooms, The Explicator, with its yearly index of titles, is a must for college and university libraries and teachers of literature. Text-based criticism thrives in The Explicator. One of few in its class, the journal publishes concise notes on passages of prose and poetry. Each issue contains between 25 and 30 notes on works of literature, ranging from ancient Greek and Roman times to our own, from throughout the world. Students rely on The Explicator for insight into works they are studying.