Conference Contribution Details
Mandatory Fields
Olga Springer
"Connecting the Dots": Conceptualizing "Trace" in the Nexus of Novels and Readers' Sensory Imaginings
This conference is designed to shed new light on the analysis of novel reading experiences by examining in what manner the concept of trace offers a key to readers’ willingness to engage with, and emotionally respond to, novels. In this spirit, this symposium sets out to investigate the interaction between trace and reading as facets of interpretive processes actively engaging the recipient in creative acts of sensory imagination.
Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany (online)
Oral Presentation
2020
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Optional Fields
24-SEP-20
25-SEP-20
“‘I don’t have a lot to go on’”: Catalogue and Trace in Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho (1991) Olga Springer, Dublin City University The concept of the trace is relevant for Bret Easton Ellis’s controversial autodiegetic narrative American Psycho (1991) for several reasons. From its beginning, the text plays with the reader’s expectations raised by the title, for example in the description of the traces the protagonist finds in his apartment: […] the Cremina sterling silver espresso maker (which is, oddly, still warm) that I got at Hammacher Schlemmer (the thermal-insulated stainless-steel espresso cup and the saucer and spoon are sitting by the sink, stained) […] (27) The warm Espresso maker and the “stained” dishes appear harmless but the qualifier “oddly” subtly raises the question how the narrator could be puzzled by these traces since they must be caused by his own actions. Moreover, the adjective “stained” is retrospectively associated with the gruesome details of the serial murders the protagonist commits. In its use of traces, the passage anticipates the disconnection of actions and consequences that becomes increasingly visible as Patrick Bateman’s sanity slips away. Although he leaves traces of his murders and a detective conducts an investigation, his crimes are never discovered. The physical traces which are woven through the fabric of the novel are linked to the concept of materiality: The narrator is fetishistically obsessed with exterior appearance and expensive brands, creating endless inventories of products, pop songs, and dishes. These catalogues, taking up pages at a time, imbue the novel with a specific surface quality – they masquerade as signs or traces of meaning but lack essence, and become interchangeable. Utilising experientiality as its theoretical basis, this presentation will moreover draw on the treatment of the trace in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) as intertexts of American Psycho.