Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club, Invisible Monsters, Choke
Ebook
Overview
Offering a world full of traumatized characters trapped in a consumerist society where men, women, sex and gender have become unstable commodities, Chuck Palahniuk has become one of the most controversial of contemporary novelists. This book is the first guide to bring together scholars from a full range of critical perspectives to explore three of Palahniuk’s most widely-studied novels: Fight Club, Invisible Monsters and Choke. Examining these works in light of such key critical themes as violence, masculinity, postmodern aesthetics and trauma, the book also explores the ethical dimension of Palahniuk’s work that is often lost in the heat of the controversies surrounding his books.
Together with annotated guides to further reading, Chuck Palahniuk also includes section introductions surveying the contexts and reception of each novel, making this an essential guide for students and scholars of contemporary literature.
From trauma to postmodernism and gender theory, this guide surveys a full range of critical perspectives on three of Palahniuk’s major novels, including Fight Club.
Introduces a full range of critical perspectives on Palahniuk’s most widely-studied novels.
Section introductions survey the contexts of each novel and key themes in contemporary scholarship.
Annotated guides to further reading aid further study and research.
Covers such core critical issues as trauma, ethics, masculinity and consumerism.
Series Editor’s Introduction, Sarah Graham
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Chuck Palahniuk and the posthuman being, Francisco Collado-Rodríguez
Part I: Fight Club
1. Violence, Spaces, and a Fragmenting Consciousness in Fight Club, James R. Giles
2. The Avatars of Masculinity: How Not to Be a Man, Eduardo Mendieta
3. Body Contact : Acting Out is the Best Defense in Fight Club, Laurie Vickroy
Part II: Invisible Monsters
Introduction
4. Invisible Monsters and Palahniuk’s Perverse Sublime, Andrew Slade
5. The opposite of a miracle: Trauma in Invisible Monsters, Richard Viskovic and Eluned Summers-Bremner
6. From Solid to Liquid: Invisible Monsters and the Blank Fiction Road Story, Sonia Baelo-Allué
Part III: Choke
Introduction
7. Chuck Palahniuk’s Edible Complex, Jesse Kavadlo
8. Anger, Anguish, and Art: Choke, David Cowart
9. Addiction in Choke, Nieves Pascual
Works Cited
Further Reading
Notes on Contributors
Index
- Title: Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club, Invisible Monsters, Choke
- Author: Francisco Collado-Rodriguez
- Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Contemporary North American Fiction
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2013
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 208
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781441138453, 9781441174321, 144117432X, 1441138455
- Resource ID: LLS:9781441138453
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T10:15:38Z
Francisco Collado-Rodriguez is Professor of English at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. He is a former President of the Spanish Association for American Studies and his previous publications include (as co-editor) Masculinities, Femininities and the Power of the Hybrid in US Narratives.