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Showing posts from November 14, 2008

Jay Loves A Book #5 -- American Psycho

When I was in graduate school, we got to create our own curriculum for the freshman English classes. We had to have our syllabii (syllabuses?) approved, of course, but the approval standards were not that strict, and we were all English majors, and so, therefore, skilled at the bullshit that professors liked to hear, so we pretty much got anything we wanted approved. One semester, I did a whole freshman comp class on tropes in horror fiction. Another semester, we spent all 12 weeks on The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom . (It hardly seems fair, does it? :) ) One semester, my friend Joe, a fellow graduate student, decided to do a whole semester on the theme of the unreliable narrator, and the first book he chose for the class was American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. All the rest of the graduate students were like, "aww, man! I should have thought of the unreliable narrator!" (That semester I was doing E.M. Forster--as an aside, I learned the important lesson