Format: Mémoire

«American Psycho shocked and continues to shock readers and critics alike. A look into the power of clothing as a language and a personal system of semiology, metaphors, and metonymy pushes the violence and pornography of the novel aside to create an understanding of Patrick Bateman, the well-dressed serial killer and the society in which he lives and kills.» [Résumé]

«The autodiegetic protagonist Patrick Bateman, in Bret Easton Ellis s American Psycho (1991), is a troubling character, for he is highly-educated, wealthy and handsome as well as a torturer, a killer and a cannibal. This antagonistic behavior, nonetheless, does not make him a singular character. The four sides he presents throughout the novel are singular, though: (1) he consumes humans and commodities equally; (2) he competes for recognition and admiration; (3) his acts are horrific; and (4) his narration is unreliable. As a yuppie (a popular term from the 1980s used to define young urban U.S. professionals), Bateman is materialistic and hedonistic. As he lives off the excesses of a consumer society, he is incapable of distinguishing people from products. As a self-absorbed, narcissistic protagonist, he becomes a competitor struggling to get approval from his peers. Nevertheless, Bateman is a serial killer, and his detailed descriptions of tortures and murders are horrifying. Finally, we readers cannot rely on his narrative once we notice ambiguities and divergences. Zygmunt Bauman (2009) posits that an extremely capitalist society forces people to be commodified. Christopher Lasch (1991) asseverates that the old legendary Narcissus gave birth to a new one, paradoxical, dependent and less confident. Most of Bateman s victims are socially-marginalized characters, members of minority groups, such as homeless people, homosexuals, immigrants, and prostitutes. As a matter of fact, Bateman may be regarded as having a predatory identity, as defined by Arjun Appadurai (2006). However, this autodiegetic narrator, together with his inconsistent narrative, cannot be entirely trusted. These are the points I want to debate regarding this fourfold serial killer.» [Résumé]

«This research project examines the functioning of one specific serial murderer fandom community present online. Using ethnographic content analysis, the fandom was shown to undergo the creation, reinforcement and subversion of its own moral boundaries, undertake strategies of identity management in relation to their fan identity, and undergo emotion work to cope with the realities of serial murderers.» [Résumé]

«Particularly unique in true and fictionalized crime narratives is the serial killer; a criminal overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly white, and understood by cultural scholars like Mark Seltzer and David Schmid as distinctly American. This thesis offers a concerted look at one such figure: Lester Ballard, the problematic “protagonist” of Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God. My study is organized into four sections which take up the language of criminal classification in order to more fully determine how Lester functions. “Who Is(n’t) Lester Ballard?” troubles the existing scholarship which sees fictional Lester as a descendant of real-life murderer Ed Gein. “What is Lester Ballard?: Federal Definitions of Serial Killers,” argues that McCarthy actively subverts the narrative of the knowable, captured killer that the FBI and the public seek from stories of repetitive, violent crime. “Why Is Lester Ballard?: Inquiries into Motive” suggests that McCarthy purposefully denies psychological motivation and instead focuses on Lester’s corporeality as a means of complicating his mythicization by the residents of Sevierville. Finally, “Where is Lester Ballard?: The Liminal Space of Crime Fact and Fiction” posits that McCarthy ultimately creates a microcosm of true crime writing in Lester’s fictional community.|That McCarthy’s novel mimics the real world communities of true crime creators and consumers connects a traditional literary study to the cultural/rhetorical study of true crime podcasting I offer in part two. In crime narratives of either kind, there is a constant implication of the other – true crime is narrativized along the lines of crime fiction, and crime fiction constantly strives to be so potent as to be mistaken for crime fact. For this reason, I take up one specific branch of the current explosion of true crime treatments, the true crime comedy podcast My Favorite Murder, as a complex and unique iteration of the genre and the figure of the investigator which begins with Nancy Drew and develops through televisual girl detectives like the Pretty Little Liars and Veronica Mars.» [Résumé]

«Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007) offers a critique of the mass media’s efforts to restore American valiance with heroic narratives of ordinary people in the aftermath of 9/11. Amending prior scholarly readings of Zodiac as a serial killer narrative, I reconfigure my analysis by taking Fincher at his word and treating it as a journalism film. Borrowing a term from political theorist Elisabeth Anker, I argue that, unlike other contemporary journalism films, Zodiac is constructed as a “melodrama of failure” that, rather than seeking mastery, unveils the instability of evidence and the obsessive uncertainty of procedure. With his film sitting between both the failures of journalism surrounding 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis, Fincher harkens back to the 1970s to unmask the malignancy of failures past. Manifesting low-level anxiety and doubt within the public, I contend that Fincher presents media as at once looming and intrusive, present and absent, and detached yet affective, privileging fragmentation over unity to put us in touch with temporal potentialities, to what Homay King attributes to the virtual. Fincher’s return to an era of malaise and an apparent obsession with indexicality underscores our unstable epistemological and phenomenological relationships to old and new media.» [Résumé]

«Serial murder is tightly woven in the foundation of American history, and as such, so has serial murder been a plotline in American media. Throughout time, there have been books, television shows, films, and podcasts that both entertain and inform media consumers about the heinous crimes committed by serial killers. Even when known for violently murdering multiple victims, serial killers have an allure that takes their status from death row inmate to a celebrity in their own right. The popularity of the serial killer genre of media calls for an analysis of the representation of serial killers in the media, along with an analysis of gratifications received from audience members after viewing. With an inductive, qualitative approach, this thesis used framing and uses and gratifications as a framework for understanding serial killer frames and audience reactions to those frames, ultimately shedding light on audience interest in serial killer-themed media content.» [Résumé]

«The trans-coded monster, which arose from the spectacle of real-life serial killer Ed Gein’s murderous and taxidermic hobbies and the “gay-panic” spun from the headlines of the Leopold and Loeb slaying, the monster serves as a functionary of social control on two levels. First, the societal level, in which the monster, as a product of society, teaches what is and is not permissible in that society.. The second level is the personal level, in which the monster teaches the audience about the boundaries of their own desire and that desire’s possibility. The product of these two levels’ methods of control is a pedagogy of tense familiarity wherein an uncomfortable identification with the monster arises and through which the very nature of the monster changes. The monster’s act of teaching social order in turn reveals a positive, albeit hidden curriculum where the audience learns about itself, its existence, and its experience. This accident of monster-methodology renders the monster sympathetic, normalized via the loss of mystery surrounding its depiction and the repetition of its own image; thus, the monster is a self-defeating tool – even when resurrected. In short, the pedagogy of monsters is like many others: when implemented correctly, it renders itself useless to subjects who have completely learned its structures – the audience graduates from their fear rather than being controlled by it.» [Résumé]

«Gender and sexual diversity have a history of being invoked, explicitly or implicitly, to further the monstrosity of villainous characters, including those who are (nominally) human. One such example is popular culture’s most famous cannibalistic serial killer, Hannibal Lecter. This paper traces the meanings constructed by queerness in the Hannibal Lecter stories, beginning by addressing the implications of queerness within Thomas Harris’s tetralogy and Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs. Next, this paper turns to Bryan Fuller’s 2013 television adaptation, Hannibal, and its inheritance of homophobic depictions of villains, both from broader gothic and horror contexts and from its direct source material. Despite this legacy of queercoding, Hannibal breaks from the longstanding connections between queerness and villainy, using gothic tropes and aesthetics to readdress queer monstrosity through the gothic context where it emerged. Fuller’s choice to center his adaptation on a love story between two men resists the negative connections between queerness and monstrosity. Instead of recreating homophobic tropes, I argue that Fuller’s adaptation provides a space for reclamation, where Hannibal’s queer desires are not a furthering of villainy but a sign of his humanity.» [Résumé]