J.G. Ballard's Surrealist Imagination

J.G. Ballard's Surrealist Imagination PDF Author: Jeannette Baxter
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351925814
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Making the case that J. G. Ballard's fictional and non-fictional writings must be read within the framework of Surrealism, Jeannette Baxter argues for a radical revisioning of Ballard that takes account of the political and ethical dimensions of his work. Ballard's appropriation of diverse Surrealist aesthetic forms and political writings, Baxter suggests, are mobilised to contest official narratives of postwar history and culture and offer a series of counter-historical and counter-cultural critiques. Thus Ballard's work must be understood as an exercise in Surrealist historiography that is politically and ethically engaged. Placing Ballard's illustrated texts within this critical framework permits Baxter to explore the effects of photographs, drawings, and other visual symbols on the reading experience and the production of meaning. Ballard's textual spectacles raise a variety of questions about the shifting role of the reader and the function of the written text within a predominantly visual culture, while acknowledging the visual contexts of Ballard's Surrealist writings allows a very different historical picture of the author and his work to emerge.

J.G. Ballard's Surrealist Imagination

J.G. Ballard's Surrealist Imagination PDF Author: Jeannette Baxter
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351925814
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Making the case that J. G. Ballard's fictional and non-fictional writings must be read within the framework of Surrealism, Jeannette Baxter argues for a radical revisioning of Ballard that takes account of the political and ethical dimensions of his work. Ballard's appropriation of diverse Surrealist aesthetic forms and political writings, Baxter suggests, are mobilised to contest official narratives of postwar history and culture and offer a series of counter-historical and counter-cultural critiques. Thus Ballard's work must be understood as an exercise in Surrealist historiography that is politically and ethically engaged. Placing Ballard's illustrated texts within this critical framework permits Baxter to explore the effects of photographs, drawings, and other visual symbols on the reading experience and the production of meaning. Ballard's textual spectacles raise a variety of questions about the shifting role of the reader and the function of the written text within a predominantly visual culture, while acknowledging the visual contexts of Ballard's Surrealist writings allows a very different historical picture of the author and his work to emerge.

The Crystal World

The Crystal World PDF Author: J. G. Ballard
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0007374895
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
From J. G. Ballard, author of ‘Crash’ and ‘Cocaine Nights’ comes his extraordinary vision of an African forest that turns all in its path to crystal.

J.G. Ballard

J.G. Ballard PDF Author: Andrzej Gasiorek
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719070532
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
A comprehensive account of the work of J.G. Ballard, one of the most important fiction writers of the past forty years. Traces the development of his career, and the significant contribution he has made to contemporary writing.

Surrealism, Science Fiction and Comics

Surrealism, Science Fiction and Comics PDF Author: Gavin Parkinson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 1781381437
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Although the self-definition of Surrealism and the initial defining of science fiction as a genre both took place in the 1920s and the links between the two are manifest, no full study has appeared till now on Surrealism and SF. Across ten original essays, Surrealism, Science Fiction and Comics looks at how the Surrealist movement in France and the USA used, informed, contributed to, and criticised SF from that moment, whilst including discussion of the related genre of comics. Among its aims are a reassessment of Jules Verne in the light of Surrealism and an analysis of the debate in the 1950s on the 'new' Anglo-American literature arriving in France. This received, in fact, a mixed reception from the Surrealists of that decade even though writers and intellectuals close to the movement in the 1920s were directly responsible for its success. The book includes further essays on the subsequent impact of Surrealism on SF novelists J.G. Ballard and Alan Burns, and features essays that argue for Salvador Dalí's closeness to SF in the 1960s and his disagreement with the earlier scientific romance defined by Verne. The chapters that bring in comics range from theoretical discussions of the relation between the original comic strips of Rodolphe Töpffer and the key Surrealist technique of automatism, used in art and writing, through the cybernetic implications of the proto-SF Surrealist ciné-roman 'M. Wzz...' of 1929, which has never discussed in any detail before, to the 1948 Vache paintings by René Magritte, inspired by Louis Forton's strip Les Pieds nickelés. This pioneering set of essays shows how Surrealism from the 1920s to the 1970s did not just receive and adapt SF but impacted the genre in its later manifestations.

Authors and Art Movements of the Twentieth Century

Authors and Art Movements of the Twentieth Century PDF Author: Declan Lloyd
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000804631
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
This book explores the great influence of twentieth-century artists and art movements on many major writers of the twentieth century. It focuses in particular on four seminal writers who were strongly influenced by very different movements: they are Gertrude Stein and Cubism, William S. Burroughs and Dada, J. G. Ballard and Surrealism, and Douglas Coupland and Pop Art. For these authors the presence and influence of these art movements is not limited to a small cluster of texts, but can be felt much more expansively across their work, infiltrating all manner of multifarious and complex dimensions. These authors are all keen to explore new methods of shifting the signature styles and forms of visual art into the literary world. Alongside these more overt methods of artistic transposition, the authors also often demonstrate a deep philosophical affinity with their chosen movements. This book uproots and examines these kinds of artistic engagements, and also explores the authors’ own personal connections with the world of art. For these are all authors not only interested in visual art, but also intimately connected to the art world. Indeed, some went on to become renowned artists in their own right, while others were closely associated with major historical art figures. Above all however, they are unified by a kindred interest in exploring how the methods and philosophies of art can be transposed into, and even challenge the constraints of traditional forms of literature.

Challenging Anthropocentrism in Eco-Science Fiction Novels

Challenging Anthropocentrism in Eco-Science Fiction Novels PDF Author: Fatma Gamze Erkan
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527567060
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
This book explores the relationship between humanity and nature while challenging the notion that anthropocentric behaviour causes the environmental catastrophes depicted in the four selected British eco-science fiction novels. These novels are John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956), J. G. Ballard’s The Drought (1965), Brian Aldiss’s Earthworks (1965), and John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up (1972), all of which fictionalise the fact that the consequences of environmental problems can be diverse but equally serious. This book examines how even the smallest damage caused by human beings to the environment negatively affects them, other living beings, and the ecosystem they need to live and flourish. In conjunction with these, the factors and conditions that push characters in the novels to ignore and harm the environment are also scrutinised. While examining how and why the environmental problems in the novels have arisen, it is evaluated whether the authors propose solutions to these problems and, if so, what they are.

The Psychological Fictions of J.G. Ballard

The Psychological Fictions of J.G. Ballard PDF Author: Samuel Francis
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1472513037
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
J. G. Ballard self-professedly 'devoured' the work of Freud as a teenager, and entertained early thoughts of becoming a psychiatrist; he opened his novel-writing career with a manifesto declaring his wish to write a science fiction exploring not outer but 'inner space', and declaring the need for contemporary fiction to be viewed 'as a branch of neurology'. He also apparently welcomed a reader's report on Crash (1973) condemning him as 'beyond psychiatric help' as confirming his achievement of 'total artistic success'. Samuel Francis investigates Ballard's engagement with psychology and the psychological in his fiction, tracing the influence of key figures including Sigmund Freud, C.G. Jung and R.D. Laing and placing his work in the context of the wider fields of psychology and psychiatry. While the psychological preoccupations of his writing are very clear - including his use of concepts such as the unconscious, psychopathology, 'deviance', obsession, abnormal psychology and schizophrenia - this is the first book to offer a detailed analysis of this key conceptual and historical context for his fiction.

Index to Theses with Abstracts Accepted for Higher Degrees by the Universities of Great Britain and Ireland and the Council for National Academic Awards

Index to Theses with Abstracts Accepted for Higher Degrees by the Universities of Great Britain and Ireland and the Council for National Academic Awards PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Dissertations, Academic
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description


Posthuman Subjectivity in the Novels of J.G. Ballard

Posthuman Subjectivity in the Novels of J.G. Ballard PDF Author: Carolyn Lau
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100091237X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
This book proposes that Ballard’s novels extrapolate the formation of a posthuman subjectivity that is centred around an affirmative understanding of what a human body can do. This new subjectivity transforms constraints and prescribed desires into creative openings in a hyper-mediated control society that conditions docile bodies through technology and consumerism. Set in surrealist predicaments in postwar affluent Western societies, Ballard’s novels remind us of the fragile veneer of order in the familiar every day. In these moments of crisis, complacent characters are compelled to undergo a process of defamiliarisation and transformation of their understanding of the self and the body. The ability to form new relationships with the unfamiliar is imperative to survival in a hostile environment. Ballard delineates both the possibilities and obstacles of forming these relationships. In particular, the author attributes the failure to do so to the irreconcilable contradictions of late capitalism.

The Angle Between Two Walls

The Angle Between Two Walls PDF Author: Roger Luckhurst
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
J. G. Ballard is a pre-eminent figure in science fiction, being one of the central figures in the British New Wave of the 1960s. This is the first theoretically informed book on Ballard.