![]() ![]() Gripping, sly, suspenseful, deeply haunting and often darkly funny. Published when he was just twenty-one, this extraordinary and instantly infamous work has become a rare thing: a cult classic and a timeless embodiment of the zeitgeist. Set against the intensely vivid and nostalgic backdrop of pre-Less Than Zero LA, The Shards is a mesmerizing fusing of fact and fiction, the real and the imagined, that brilliantly explores the emotional fabric of Bret's life at 17-sex and jealousy, obsession and murderous rage. ![]() Instead, it imposes homogeneity on social relations, pushing the characters to the brink of invisibility and nothingness. In 1985, Bret Easton Ellis shocked, stunned and disturbed with his debut novel, Less Than Zero. The present study argues that abstract space numbs the potentials for difference and heterogeneity in Ellis's novel. In this paper, the role abstract space plays in Ellis's novel is analyzed in the light of Henri Lefebvre's theory of space. In Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero, abstract space, by homogenizing and fragmenting the body and lived experience, makes the characters comply with the consumer culture and suppresses the potentials for the difference and the emergence of alternative spaces. This process of homogenization acts as a mechanism of control to preserve the current status quo. Prevalent in the late capitalist society is abstract space that homogenizes and flattens out the differences, conflicts and contradictions on the social scene. The consumer culture of late capitalism is more than ever associated with the concept of urban space. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |