caa a22 4500 378885375 CHVBK 20180305123441.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161128e200404 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1515/zaa.2004.52.2.153 doi (NATIONALLICENCE)gruyter-10.1515/zaa.2004.52.2.153 Berensmeyer Ingo Opening the Gates of Pandemonium: Simulacra of Apocalypse in Nathanael West's A Cool Million and The Day of the Locust [Elektronische Daten] [Ingo Berensmeyer] Nathanael West's last two novels, A Cool Million, or The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin (1934) and The Day of the Locust (1939), thematize the mass-cultural impact of simulation in ways that point forward to post-World War II American literature. They do so most notably by establishing a connection between the twentieth-century economic culture of consumption (the ideology of consumerism) and apocalyptic traditions of Western thought, a connection they explore through the figure of the simulacrum and the structural motif of unveiling. This article intends to demonstrate that West's literary analysis of simulacra transcends the boundaries of traditional readings of ‘modernism' and that, contrary to a number of interpretations, his texts do not offer a straight repetition of but a critical commentary on apocalyptic modes of thought and reading. © 2014 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik De Gruyter 52/2(2004-04), 153-166 52:2<153 2004 52 zaa https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa.2004.52.2.153 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa.2004.52.2.153 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Berensmeyer Ingo NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik De Gruyter 52/2(2004-04), 153-166 52:2<153 2004 52 zaa CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-gruyter