Striving for It Is a Disaster. Attaining It Is a Killer’: A Critique of Consumerism in Hubert Selby’s Requiem for a Dream

سال انتشار: 1392
نوع سند: مقاله کنفرانسی
زبان: انگلیسی
مشاهده: 1,100

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TELT01_081

تاریخ نمایه سازی: 28 آذر 1392

چکیده مقاله:

Balance in economy and the development of the new technology which emerged after World War II in America, resulted in industrialization and creation of the capitalist society which promised hope and prosperity after the disappointments and devastations of the war. America’s capitalist system, associated with a shift from an age of production to an age of consumption, propagandized a new age in which the long perused American Dream could be achieved through active consumerism. Moreover, media, through advertisement instilled in people a certain way to live and reach happiness and also fed their eyes with commodities to be purchased in order to create a sense of wholeness. However, this consumer-media culture gradually penetrated into people’s lives and created a lack of communication which disintegrated units of human relations and isolated people. To fill this void, people plunged deeper into what created it in the first place. Their consumption took the form of addiction which eventually, consumed their relationships (including the most intimate ones) and their whole beings (their identity and subjectivity, perception of reality, feelings, minds, souls, and bodies). Thus, the capitalist system that offers consumption as the way to reach happiness, fails its people by the logic of consumption; in other words, with the realization that within a capitalist system everything is objectified and provoked as consumable models. Therefore, instead of fulfilling The American Dream, a society based on the logic of consumption leads to a loss of subjectivity and the devastation of the people along with their dreams which indicates the futility of The American Dream in the first place. Critics such as Jean Baudrillard and novelists such as Hubert Selby, criticize this postmodern condition in their prominent works. Hubert Selby’s Requiem for a Dream (1978) which in 2001 was made into an outstanding film, directed by Daren Aronofsky, depicts the disintegration of human relations, the devastation of dreams, objectification and loss of subjectivity, and the ultimate fall into misery in the most tragic way. It scrutinizes various forms of consumption (drugs, food, television, sex…) and their deadly effects on the characters. The four main characters, Sara Goldfarb, Harry Goldfarb, Marion Silver, and Tyrone C. Love each suffer from individual addictions, but the addiction they all have in common is that of hope for happy endings which the capitalist culture promises. By the use of Jean Baudrillard theories, this paper aims to trace the way consumption annihilates the human relations, subjectivity and eventually life.

نویسندگان

Saghar Safaeyan

M. A Student in English Literature, English Department, Vali-e-Asr University of Rafsanjan

Basheer Sadeghi

M. A Student in English Literature, English Department, Vali-e-Asr University of Rafsanjan

Sohila Faghfori

Assistant Professor in English Literature, English Department, Vali-e-Asr University of Rafsanjan

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