interstice
(en)
(noun) an intervening space
27
a revealing interstice in the early eighties
am i ever going to learn how to pronounce this word?
notable
4 months, 3 weeks ago
a revealing interstice in the early eighties
am i ever going to learn how to pronounce this word?
notable
4 months, 3 weeks ago
30
[...] Ellis's characters do not even exist as archetypes -- we are sometimes given the sense that they do have individual qualities but that these are so spurious, negligible and second-hand as to be not worth mentioning. This is in itself ironic as contemporary America promises personality and personal liberation to individuals as part of the cornucopia of consumer choice. They are encouraged to spend their lives lovingly dissecting and nurturing their precious pysches in a ferment of personal growth, therapy, self-help, counselling, hypnotism, channelling, re-birth and a million other expensive forms of charlatanism, until they emerge, shrink-wrapped, into exactly the sort of worthless, uniform mediocrity that Ellis is citing. All in all, Ellis's disinclination to invest character with meaning is a reflection of a society overloaded with the endlessly circulating signs and signifiers of consumerism which are themselves devoid of meaning and doomed to revolve forever without substance or hope of signification in an "orgy of indifference, disconnection, exhibition and circulation." [...]
[...] Ellis's characters do not even exist as archetypes -- we are sometimes given the sense that they do have individual qualities but that these are so spurious, negligible and second-hand as to be not worth mentioning. This is in itself ironic as contemporary America promises personality and personal liberation to individuals as part of the cornucopia of consumer choice. They are encouraged to spend their lives lovingly dissecting and nurturing their precious pysches in a ferment of personal growth, therapy, self-help, counselling, hypnotism, channelling, re-birth and a million other expensive forms of charlatanism, until they emerge, shrink-wrapped, into exactly the sort of worthless, uniform mediocrity that Ellis is citing. All in all, Ellis's disinclination to invest character with meaning is a reflection of a society overloaded with the endlessly circulating signs and signifiers of consumerism which are themselves devoid of meaning and doomed to revolve forever without substance or hope of signification in an "orgy of indifference, disconnection, exhibition and circulation." [...]
34
[...] Ellis's fictional characters [...] have not experienced the vast cultural and politico-economic upheavals of the late 1960s and early seventies. The postmodern is the only world they know. They have inherited its treacherous freedoms without dialectics.
[...] Ellis's fictional characters [...] have not experienced the vast cultural and politico-economic upheavals of the late 1960s and early seventies. The postmodern is the only world they know. They have inherited its treacherous freedoms without dialectics.
37
[...] Blair and Clay are young, rich, attractive and "in love" yet the conventional accoutrements of a happy romance -- sun, sea, sex -- bore them quickly. It is all used up within a few days and the bone-deep restlessness causes them to turn away from each other, to re-focus on the ever-present television which will be selling them dreams of exactly the kind they are engaged in. They consume their own happiness, bolting it down as though something in their awareness of themselves as this lucky, privileged couple were sickening them even as they glut. It is as though the advertisement-like, hyperreal qualities of their situation render it tenuous and unreal. What is there to say? What is there to do? What is there to be interested in? Nothing. [...]
[...] Blair and Clay are young, rich, attractive and "in love" yet the conventional accoutrements of a happy romance -- sun, sea, sex -- bore them quickly. It is all used up within a few days and the bone-deep restlessness causes them to turn away from each other, to re-focus on the ever-present television which will be selling them dreams of exactly the kind they are engaged in. They consume their own happiness, bolting it down as though something in their awareness of themselves as this lucky, privileged couple were sickening them even as they glut. It is as though the advertisement-like, hyperreal qualities of their situation render it tenuous and unreal. What is there to say? What is there to do? What is there to be interested in? Nothing. [...]