The Medium Is Also The Message: Narrating Media in Bret Easton Ellis's Glamorama

Abstract “No medium today, and certainly no single media event, seems to do its cultural work in isolation from other media” Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin write in Remediation. Understanding New Media. This is also the case when it comes to a postmodern novel like Bret Easton Ellis' Glamorama. Hence this article demonstrates how different kinds of narrative ambiguities in a novel like Glamorama may be explained by the use of concepts like self-reflexive narration, remediation, and intermediality. It begins with some suggestions to improvements of previous narratological readings of the novel. Then by focusing on first-person present tense narration the article shows how the research on remediation may be a useful when explaining how literary fiction absorbs media and new media. To rephrase Marshall McLuhan's famous phrase, one could say that the medium is also the message in many postmodern novels, and in this respect Glamorama certainly is no exception.