Event overview
Goldsmiths Literature Seminar
Monika Loewy (Goldsmiths)
Lunar Park opens with a sentence repeated from a previous novel: the narrator states, ¨You do an awfully good impression of yourself,” thus setting the satirical and deceptive tone of the text. This paper will focus on two themes implicit in this sentence: that Lunar Park tracks Ellis’s search for his true identity and past, and this is impossible. It can be suggested that this book is centred on an inability to know an author, text, or oneself within a fragmented context.
Ellis’s semi-autobiography tells the story of his fame and family, and takes place in a suburban town outside New York City, which is under the threat of terrorist acts in a post-9/11 America. Here, fictional dolls and characters begin to haunt Ellis’s home, whether or not the events are products of a mad man’s imagination left unanswered. Throughout, descriptions of America’s cultural and physical landscape in the 21st Century emphasize its rupture; America’s past is colored as having been repressed behind cultural excess.
This paper will discuss how Lunar Park also chronicles Ellis´s journey to find his true identity as an individual and author in an expanse of ashes and fragments. Arguing that, by fictionalizing the past, Ellis gestures towards the impossibility of ever restoring or remembering it. This impossibility is based upon his identity and book having been structured through a meaningless world where ¨publishing a shiny booklike object was simply an excuse for parties and glamour¨(9). Thus, Lunar Park is a prop that embodies its context: it is fragmented, blurs fiction and reality, and is haunted by a lack.
This loss is echoed in the decidedly post-modern prose, which escapes every attempt at meaning. Lunar Park thus materializes the falling monument it represents: as post 9/11 America is revealed as catastrophic, Lunar Park reveals its own erasure. This paper will trace Ellis´s frustrated search to find his identity as a person and author in a post 9/11, post-modern, American context.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 24 Oct 2013 | 6:30pm - 8:00pm |
Accessibility
If you are attending an event and need the College to help with any mobility requirements you may have, please contact the event organiser in advance to ensure we can accommodate your needs.
