“Uh, I'm a pretty sick guy”: The dialogue of American Psycho in fiction and film
Journal of Pragmatics, 2025
This paper examines how dialogue in Bret Easton Ellis's novel American Psycho (1991) serves to pr... more This paper examines how dialogue in Bret Easton Ellis's novel American Psycho (1991) serves to project the identity of its controversial protagonist Patrick Bateman. A comparison with the dialogue in Mary Harron's film adaptation (2000) further highlights the importance of dialogue for characterisation by analysing how changes in Bateman's conversational behaviour on screen result in a different interpretation of the character. A pragmastylistic analysis reveals that dialogues are characterised by a strong discrepancy between their form and their content. While Conversation Analysis exposes few irregularities in the turn-taking structure of the dialogues, a Gricean pragmatic analysis confirms the impression that the content of the dialogues is often vapid – the participants fail to establish a meaningful connection with one another through a cooperative exchange of information. Bateman tries to disrupt the vapid interaction by confessing ever more openly to his killing sprees in a desperate attempt to establish some genuine contact. However, as the dialogues maintain the semblance of conversation, his shocking confessions go completely unnoticed. A scene-based analysis of the film, complete with a multimodal transcript, provides an insight into how the reduction of Bateman's deviances significantly alters his characterisation.
Uploads
Papers by Monika Kavalir
The article analyses transfer effects between Slovene and English with regard to the little researched area of absolute and relative uses of adjectives. The practical test of the extent to which Slovene students of English (levels C1 and C2) exhibit (negative) transfer of linguistic strategies between the two languages builds on a theoretical account of adjectival use that distinguishes between the subsystems of standard (internal, external) and degree (base, median, high). The results show that in translating from Slovene into English, the great majority of the students tested retain absolute comparatives, even though they are much less common in English. On the other hand, a significant proportion of students also keep absolute superlatives when translating into their mother tongue, even though this is a productive strategy in English and only rarely used in Slovene.