Death is served : the serialization of death and its conceptualization through food metaphors in US literature and media

Cover 1 Half title 2 About Authors 3 Title 4 Copyright 5 Contents 6 Introduction: The Paradoxical Nature of Death in America 8 1. The Text Devouring the Dead: Edgar Allan Poe and David Lynch’s American Gothic 24 1.1 Edgar Allan Poe – Various Figurations of the Same Death 29 1.2 Rewriting the Dead: Twin Peaks 40 1.3 Overcoming the Dead: Twin Peaks– The Return 50 2. I am Dead, Yet I Live – The Zombie’s Gluttonous Craving for the Living 60 2.1 Romero’s Zombies: Dawn of the Dead, Land of the Dead 67 2.2 Brains a la Mode: iZombie and the Reinterpretation of the Traditional Zombie as Subject 76 3. Producing the Corpse: Quentin Tarantino’s Revenge Narratives 90 3.1 The Personal Vendetta: Riding the Pussy Wagon – Kill(ing) Bill and Death Proof 96 3.2 Reimaginations of History as Collective Vengeance: Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained 111 4. Ingesting the Corpse: The Cannibal’s Taste for Death – American Psycho and Hannibal 126 4.1 Fetishizing the Corpse: Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho 134 4.2 Le cannibalisme pour le cannibalisme: Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal 143 5. Creator/Destroyer: The Serial Killer as an American Phenomenon 156 5.1 Catering to a Compulsive Craving: Wes Craven’s Scream Franchise 166 5.2 An American Tale: The Assassination of Gianni Versace 179 Conclusion: Death. Again. 196 Acknowledgements 206 Bibliography 208 List of Illustrations 218 The American cultural imaginary is hungry for death, and thus representations of death are prominently repeated and serialized in US literature and media. Stella Castelli shows how American culture fetishizes death as part of a repetition compulsion which stems from the inability of language to satisfactorily grasp death. Taking an intermedial approach, she investigates the forms and tropes born from this preoccupation with death and conceptualizes its imagination alongside an appetite which manifests as repetitive encoding. These metaphors of food consumption provide a hermeneutic framing for analyzing representations of death across American literature and media. The American cultural imaginary is __hungry__ for death, and thus representations of death are prominently repeated and serialized in US literature and media. Stella Castelli shows how American culture fetishizes death as part of a repetition compulsion which stems from language's inability to satisfactorily grasp death. Taking an intermedial approach, she investigates the forms and tropes born from this preoccupation with death and conceptualizes its imagination alongside an appetite which manifests as repetitive encoding. These metaphors of food consumption provide a hermeneutic framing for analyzing representations of death across American literature and media.