J.G. Ballard

J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition can easily be classified as his most experimental novel, one that, more than any other of his works, succeeds in presenting, or perhaps representing, the fragmented condition of a media-saturated Western culture. On the surface, it does appear to be a postmodern and seemingly chaotic bricolage of pop iconography, landscapes, and medical references arranged non-linearly and without plot, and yet there is a unifying principle at work, anchoring the texts in a specific ideological context of 1960s Western culture. The main argument of this paper expands on Debord’s study of spectacle and regards The Atrocity Exhibition as a work that not only attempts to frustrate reading expectations, but also addresses the cultural shift towards spectacular society.

This paper examines the building in J.G. Ballard’s seminal novel High Rise as an expression of marginalization and class culture. Ballard’s dystopian vision holds within it traces of the history of buildings as expressions of power; from Victorian poorhouses, via Le Corbusier, to 1960’s public housing in Britain and the impact of post-war planning regulations. This paper explores the ways that housing has been used as a means of both control and an exertion of power by the dominant class.

Spaces double as both an effective means of control of the subordinate or working class, and as a constant reminder of the dominance of the ruling class. From confinement within poor houses to vertical slums, these spaces create a marginalised culture of subordination that culminates in Ballard’s tower. 

Deluze, Lefebvre and others can help us to understand the structural and theoretical implications of the fictional structure in High Rise. We can see how expressions of power in housing are linked to and re-enforced by fiction, but that some spaces have the ability to disrupt this relationship and push back against the dominant paradigm.

My approach builds on the works of authors such as Banham, Katz and Augé but, significantly, departs from that history through its emphasis on an examination of the way both real and fictional spaces can be seen as affective and reactive to each other. Fiction not only reacts to the real world, but fictional spaces can both re-enforce and disrupt the dominant power structures embedded within them.

Chapter 14: Postmodern cities. 5,000 words. This chapter discusses the two principal strands of the postmodern city novel: texts in which the city is presented as a verbal labyrinth,
simulacrum, or technoscape (e. g. the fiction of Auster, Borges, Calvino, Murakami, Pamuk), and texts that depict the city as conceived in postmodern urbanist discourse: the city defined by branded spaces – consumerist simulacra of properly historical urban spaces – existing amidst dilapidated interstitial spaces (e.g., Martin Amis, Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, José Saramago, Iain Sinclair, but including novels of any comparable city wherever sited), and the entwining of the two strands as the city and the lives it sustains work out their entropic trajectories, primarily absent the sort of crisis that qualifies the fictional city as properly dystopian. The presentation of the subject locates the literature in relation to poststructuralist thought or theories of postmodern urban and social theory by citing relevant theorists. It identifies, as appropriate, the presence and force of redemptive energies in the literature, and highlights the engagements with, and critiques of the history and enabling ideologies of postwar urban (re)development to the extent that they present themselves in the content and the form of the texts discussed.

Eschatological jouissance is defined here as a grim pleasure in the failure of the world. It is a feature of J. G. Ballard's prescient ecological disaster fiction of the 1960s as well as of the sardonic treatment of ecological idealism in his later fiction. Expressions of pleasure in the end of the world can be seen as forming a counter genre to utopia and, in philosophical terms, as a refusal of humanism. Humanism is defined here as the insistence to see the world from a human point of view. Anti-humanism and a concurring openness to eschatological jouissance are elements of existentialism and of poststructuralism, together with Marxism the main alternatives to humanism proposed in the twentieth century. Ecocriticism, in some of its strands, is another such replacement of humanism in which eschatological jouissance plays a significant role. Humanism may not seem a promising attitude for dealing with the ecological disasters we face, concerned as it is in the first place with the comfort of human beings. Still, it is argued here that humanism includes an awareness of the parochialism of human sympathies and that an appeal to the need to extend its sympathies to non-human sharers of the planet might well be heeded. Eschatological jouissance, as a feature of dystopian fiction and imagination, will provide the needed shudder to nudge us into such an extension of our sympathies.

The Drought is the third work in a trilogy of climate fiction novels published in the early 1960s. As the primary examples of climate fiction, The Drought stands out in the series as the novel in which the catastrophe is fully caused by human activities. Thus, suitable for ecocritical analysis, this article analyzes The Drought from a social ecological perspective in specific. Moreover, social ecology is a philosophy and movement that emerged The Drought from a social ecological perspective and reveals the implications that the author foresaw concerning the future of our planet. While criticizing the global climate crisis is also mentioned as a possible solution to maintain a harmonious existence that end, it has been concluded that Ballard targets the capitalist world order by exposing the devastating consequences of a climatic cataclysm caused by excessive industrial activities.

Examining the whole range of Ballard's writings, from the early science fiction stories to Cocaine Nights (1996), Delville's study offers a critical and theoretically informed analysis of his achievements as a novelist and a commentator on contemporary culture. It also identifies and clarifies a number of themes which have occupied Ballard throughout his career. These recurrent concerns include the latent and manifest meanings of technological culture, the impact of modern media on the private and collective imagination, and the postulate that our personal commitments are necessarily predetermined by our attempts to fictionalize the real.

In seeking to answer the question ‘Who Speaks Science Fiction?’, we should make some attempt at least to define this most knotty of categories and the assumptions underlying its usage.

In today’s cyber-culture the machinations and methodology of current technology are becoming increasingly invisible and unfathomable, ‘unnatural’ in their process. Yet the Gernsback legacy (modified by John W. Campbell and others) appears intact. Indeed, the success of Star Trek—Freefall in Inner Space as a kind of ‘Melrose Space’—indicates the genre’s rude health; yet it remains a ‘trainspotter’s’ pursuit (albeit with enormous commercial clout), where moral uncertainties and ethical dilemmas are flattened into simple dichotomies, usually revolving around good and evil. In part, this is an effect of the way visual renderings of science-fictional scenarios have come to displace their literary counterparts in the popular consciousness.

The article discusses how the emerging genre of American and British science fiction symbolised and expressed Cold War anxieties after 1949. 
It begins by briefly showing how a popular Western symbolised the Berlin Airlift, then considers how several new Sci Fi novels, including "The Martian Chronicles," "The Day of the Triffids," "I am Legend," and "The Bodysnatchers" each respond more precisely to changing Soviet aggression. 
The chief writers explored are Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, John Wyndham, Richard Matheson, Jack Finney, and the television writer Terry Nation.  Connections are drawn between key science fiction novels and public concerns about possible atomic war, espionage fears, future Soviet invasion, and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
It then suggests a shift in meaning affecting British science fiction from the mid-1950s, with rising fears about the demise of empire, and concerns that European civilisation is waning.  The chief writers discussed in this regard are John Christopher, whose work is linked with the Suez Crisis, & J.G. Ballard's "The Drowned World."  Strong links are also established between several British science fiction novels and William Golding's "Lord of the Flies."
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Time and space are two of the main features in Ballard’s fiction. They are also the main topic in this short story. In Chronopolis the measurement of time is forbidden. When the story’s main character, Newman, discovers the existence of clocks, he decides to defy the law to restore the previous condition. In doing so he moves from the city he used to live in to the old forsaken city. So, he moves both in time and space. He pursues the utopia of liberating time, and man, from the Orwellian prohibition of dealing with linear time. But he fails eventually, being imprisoned for having tried to break free from the State control of time. His crossing of the symbolic border between the new and the old city is a passage from a static, present time to a flowing linear time, not limited to the present. But the old Chronopolis in a sense has become a non-place, while the new one has been deprived of time, thus being characterized by non-time. Since these notions are represented by the terms, respectively, utopia and uchronia, ultimately this means a disappearing of Chronopolis on an imaginary Cartesian graph displaying it.

“Anthony Burgess and Science Fiction”, Jim Clarke, SFRA Review 313, Summer 2015, pp. 28-35.

Anthony Burgess was a reluctant writer of SF, but a highly influential one. This article, for the SFRA Review, introduces the author and his SF work and seeks to explain the reason behind his sudden reversal of attitude towards SF in mid-career.

J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise (1975) is frequently read as an imagined social experiment—an effort to under- stand, as one of its characters puts it, “the physical and psycho- logical pressures of living in a huge condominium” (HR 12). Like much of Ballard’s writing, the novel is concerned with the psychopathological dimensions of modernity, and the capacity for primordial impulses to evade its civilizing constraints. Through the physical disintegration and social devolution of the titular high-rise, Ballard disrupts the tenets of the project of architectural modernism, allowing a new, violent, and distinctly irrational way of inhabiting space to emerge.

Amy Jump and Ben Wheatley’s 2015 cinematic adaptation of High-Rise elegantly brings out the central themes of Ballard’s dystopian nightmare. Like Ballard’s text, the film explores the extent to which the built environment can elicit particular behaviors and states of mind, and shows how hierarchical structures can emerge even among people of the same class—what the building’s architect, Anthony Royal, calls the “new proletariat” of accountants, market researchers and advertising executives.

The responses to the film to date have been limited to discussions of its relevance to our contemporary, neoliberal context and, specifically, to London’s transformation at the hands of property developers; how it compares to other adaptations of Ballard novels; and how it relates to
other dystopian films released in the same period as the novel (most notably Cronenberg’s Shivers). I am instead interested in the ways in which the adaptation expands Ballard’s central conceit and, in so doing, both complicates and heightens the concerns of the original novel. This essay is thus an initial effort to understand the extent to which factors such as the film’s additional dialogues, plot lines and character developments as well as use of montage enable the film to engage with a whole gamut of tropes we associate with Ballard’s work as a whole (tropes that are, in some cases, absent from this particular Ballard text). Relatedly, I explore how the adaptation self-consciously plays with the very idea of representation, and how the frequent shots of people filming themselves and each other aptly extends Ballard’s own fascination with visual culture, mass media and celebrity.

The archive of J. G. Ballard at the British Library contains two very different draft texts for Concrete Island: an undated typescript substantially revised by hand, and a 'first draft screenplay' dated 20 September 1972. The screenplay is, in the author’s words on the title page, 'from the novel of the same title'. However, it is apparent that the screenplay is based not upon the final text of the novel but upon the unrevised typescript draft. A comparison of the two documents indicates that Ballard only turned to revising the novel by hand after having drafted the screenplay. Substantial revisions to the novel include, for example, removing the island's mummified old man (a figure present in both the typescript and the screenplay) and changing the circumstances of Proctor's death. The essay includes images of a number of draft passages that illustrate the development of the composition of Concrete Island, from typescript draft – through the intermediary text of the draft screenplay – to the revised and final text of the novel.

Making Worlds: Art and Science Fiction is an anthology of new writings by artists, curators, art historians and writers who are self-confessed science fiction fans. The linking point is the idea of science fiction as a platform for the building of alternate art histories. This collection is concerned with the ways in which science fiction might be performed, materialised or enacted within a contemporary context. Featuring essays on Stanislaw Lem, Robert Smithson, J.G. Ballard, Eduardo Paolozzi, H.P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, Samuel Delany, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Andrei Tarkovsky, R.A. Lafferty, and Stanley Kubrick as well as texts on time travel, philology, geophilosophy, loops, speculative realism, dystopias, telepathy, surrealism, pop, Mercerism, and contemporary art.

Edited by Amelia Barikin and Helen Hughes with contributions by: Adrian Martin, Amelia Barikin, Andrew Frost, Anthony White, Arlo Mountford, Brendan Lee, Charles Green, Chris McAuliffe, Chronox, Damiano Bertoli, Darren Jorgensen, Dylan Martorell, Edward Colless, Helen Hughes, Helen Johnson, Justin Clemens, Lauren Bliss, Matthew Shannon, Nathan Gray, Nick Selenitsch, OSW, Patrick Pound, Philip Brophy, Rex Butler, Ryan Johnston, and Soda_Jerk.

J.G. Ballard’s alienating constructions have enabled him to transcend the sphere of literary criticism to become an important source of reference in contemporary culture, a sphere in which the postmodern sense of urban dislocation has been a predominant aspect of analysis.
However, as argued in this article, the sense of homelessness that predominates in Ballard’s work is often accompanied by an urge to re-territorialise through and within the literary text. Therefore, the analysis seeks move away from the widely analysed tropes of postmodern alienation in the fiction of J.G. Ballard to focus on the mechanisms of making space for an alienated character. A shift in focus from the physical environments where the action takes place (buildings, colonies, neighbourhoods) to the concept of literary worlds (Doležel 1998) is performed in order to provide an innovative interpretation of Ballard’s creative geography.
Using the example of two of Ballard’s most critically acclaimed short stories – “Motel Architecture” (1978) and “The Enormous Space” (1989) – this article explores the transformation of the postmodern ‘non-place’ into a utopian enclave. The literary analysis engages with the narrative concept of one-person worlds, a narrative typology that is inextricably related to the symbolic trope of the microcosm and the socio-urban concept of the privatopia.

This essay ruminates the ethics of a co-implicated, bounded dependence between objects (human and otherwise) that are always in some sense withdrawing from each other but also always together in a some-place labeled "here": the world (where no Absolute or Outside vantage point is possible or habitable). This essay also considers the possibility, through literary studies, of building more capacious networks of more affectively companionable sentience (with texts seen as actants that possess sentience and what Jane Bennett calls "vibrant materiality").

Yayıncı Bağlam  2008  ISBN 9786055809065  |  Türkçe |  224 Sayfa
Çevirmen: Murat Erşen

"Bu deneme kendimi aylaklığa adamaya karar vermiş olduğum bir zamanda kaleme alındı. Uzun bir araştırma projesini başarıyla tamamına erdirdikten sonra, niyetim gevşemek ve hiçbir şey yapmamaktı, ama bunun kesinlikle imkansız olduğu ortaya çıktı. Görünüşe göre hiçbir şey yapmadan duracak halde değildim. Böylece, bir şey yapmak zorunda olduğumu düşündüm ve bu şey işte şu an bu denemedir.
Sıkıntı bizi ilgilendirmeyen herşeye yapıştırdığınız boş bir etikettir. Sıkıntı herşeyden önce içinde yaşadığımız bir şeydir, üstüne sistemli olarak kafa yorduğumuz bir şey değil."
Lars Fr. H. Svendsen

Society today is undergoing a series of processes and changes that can be only be described as weird. From the apocalyptic resonance of climate change and the drive to implement increasing powerful technologies into everyday life, to the hyperreality of a political and media landscape beset by chaos, there is the uneasy feeling that society, culture, and even consensual reality is beginning to experience signs of disintegration. What was considered the insanity of the margins is now experienced in the mainstream, and there is a growing feeling of wrongness, that the previous presumptions of the self, other, reality and knowledge are becoming untenable.
This thesis undertakes a detailed examination of the weird and eerie as both an aesthetic register and as a critical tool in analysing the relationship between individuals and an impersonal modern society, where agency and intention is not solely the preserve of the human and there is a feeling not so much of being to act, and being acted upon. Using the definitions and characteristics of the weird and eerie provided by Mark Fisher’s critical text, The Weird and the Eerie, I set the weird and eerie in a historical context specifically regarding both the gothic, weird fiction and with the uncanny, I then analyse the presence of the weird and the eerie present in two cultural phenomena, the online phenomenon of the Slender Man, and J.G. Ballard’s novels Crash (1973) and Concrete Island 1974). By exploring the presence of the weird and eerie in contemporary texts and online communities, I show that they are aesthetic modes that are prevalent in many levels of cultures in society. The weird and eerie I conclude provide the elements in making new conceptual tools for making sense of an increasingly chaotic and inhuman social world.

This study focuses on an ecocritical analysis of J.G. Ballard’s climate fiction novels of the early 1960s. Ecocritical perspectives, social ecological in specific have been utilized to shed light on the selected three novels of J.G. Ballard—The Wind from Nowhere, The Drowned World and The Drought. In contrast with the widespread scholarly research of surreal and psychoanalytic criticism in Ballard’s latter fiction, this study contemplates to analyse the author’s very first post-apocalyptic, climate fiction novels through the window of ecocritical theory. These three novels of the renowned British author are commonly considered as primary examples of the sub-genre of climate fiction. This study therefore proposes to analyse Ballard’s post-apocalyptic works of climate fiction by applying theories related to the school of ecocriticism, second wave of ecocriticism in particular. The study thereby aims to criticise Ballard’s oeuvre from the specific position of social ecology. Thus, the research reveals how Ballard dismantles and takes on western anthropocentrism in The Wind from Nowhere, the author’s first work of fiction, often dismissed by many including himself as an experimental work of fiction. Furthermore, the study also intends to criticise The Drowned World from a social ecofeminist viewpoint. Finally, it aspires to expose the social ecological motives behind The Drought, Ballard’s post-apocalyptic vision of a world running out of water. The study refers to a wide variety of scholars and theoreticians but mainly relies on the theories of Murray Bookchin and Karen J. Warren. Focusing on many different issues within ecocritical thought, the study insists on the scrutiny of social ecological motives in Ballard’s trilogy of climate fiction.

Lunettes, stimulateurs cardiaques, prothèses dentaires, audioprothèses, implants mammaires, bras mécatroniques, etc. : notre monde nous plonge de plus en plus dans un univers de prothèses – l'âge venant, peu d'entre nous y échappent. Cette hybridation change nos vies et notre quotidien. Elle concerne des aspects à la fois variés et essentiels : les gestes moteurs, les perceptions, l'expression de soi, l'esthétique, l'identité, l'interface et la connexion avec le monde. Les prothèses peuvent compenser une capacité défaillante. Elles peuvent aussi apporter des capacités modifiées voire inédites. Elles transforment la relation que nous entretenons avec le monde, avec autrui et avec nous-mêmes. Certaines prothèses ne relèvent plus de la compensation mais de l'augmentation ou de la modification d'une capacité ordinaire.
Il semble ainsi bienvenu d'étudier l'abondante source de réflexions prothétiques qu'apporte la science-fiction sous toutes ses formes (roman, film, bande dessinée, design, jeu vidéo, art…) Les contributeurs et contributrices de cet ouvrage révèlent la richesse et la profondeur des explorations que la science-fiction a produites depuis plus d'un siècle. Elle nous donne à vivre une multitude d'expériences par procuration qui mêlent anticipations, rêveries, interrogations personnelles et questions sociopolitiques.
Cet ouvrage académique a bénéficié de l'évaluation d'un comité de lecture universitaire associant la société savante Stella Incognita et l'Association Académique pour les Humanités (AAH). Il est aussi le fruit d'une collaboration avec le consortium de recherche Corps et Prothèses (corps-protheses.org).

In a 2015 article in The Guardian Robert Macfarlane argued that the English tradition of the “eerie” was enjoying a renewed vigour among the writers and artists of the British Isles.  Through literature, song, theatre and film these devotees of “occulture” turned an eye to the sinister aspects of the green and pleasant land, unearthing the “skull beneath the skin of the countryside” in “an attempt to account for the turbulence of England in the era of late capitalism.”  Working from Mark Fisher's 2016 study The Weird and the Eerie, this paper first seeks to differentiate the aesthetic mode of the eerie from other closely-related horror affects (such as the weird and the uncanny) and then examine the role the eerie plays in mediating the anxieties of a post-industrial, pre-Brexit Britain, giving voice to existential uncertainties, political dissension and fears of environmental collapse.  The horror fictions of M. R. James and Arthur Machen are examined in relation to scientific developments of the
nineteenth century, with the eerie in their work found to be a manifestation of the anxieties brought about by the erosion of humanity's preeminence in the world.  In contrast to this Victorian anthropocentrism, the work of J. G. Ballard, Jeff VanderMeer and Gary Budden embraces the eerie as a means of further eroding the conceit of anthropocentrism and, particularly in the latter two, challenging capitalist ideologies and disrupting narratives of xenophobia through radical notions of belonging.

War is certainly not the first thing that comes to mind when one mentions the name of British novelist and essayist James Graham Ballard, born in Shanghai in 1930 and currently living in the London suburb of Shepperton. Yet it cannot be denied that the first film adaptation of a book by Ballard, Empire of the Sun (1987), directed by media mogul Steven Spielberg was based on his lyrical and visionary 1984 war memoir. Moreover, Ballard had already dealt with the issue of warfare and violence in earlier short stories such as  "The Killing Ground" (1969), and a highly original quasi-story, "Theatre of War" (1977). This essay tries to read the 1977 highly unconventional piece by connecting it to other Ballardian texts, such as the short story "War Fever" (1989) and the quasi-novel The Atrocity Exhibition (1970). It also seeks to place Ballard’s war-related fictions against the background of well-known examples of war literature and its critical dilemmas. It also tackles a key question in Ballard criticism, that is, the complex issue of the death of affect. The proposed interpretation is that Ballard's early exposure to the horrors and the physical/psychological violence of war made him sensitive to the issue of violence (in both peace- and wartime), and triggered his unconventional and fascinating reflections on (post-)modern warfare, that can be found in those short stories as well as in some of his major works (The Atrocity Exhibition and Empire of the Sun). Thus Ballard's fiction offers us a highly original and disturbing perspective on the issue of war and violence in late modernity, against the background of a number of historical conflicts, from W.W.II to the Vietnam, to the Lebanese civil war.

This paper aims  to identify the spatial framework on the basis of which modernist dystopia is defined and then realized in fiction, especially in reference to subjectivity, as well as to present the ideological function of architecture and landscapes in representing a dystopian development of modern urban society. To this end, this paper will focus on Ballard’s High-Rise, an urban version of Lord of the Flies, where the architectural assumptions underlying the tower block are brought to bear on the psychopathological effects suffered by the tenants. This ideological debate will be cast in reference to the works of Le Corbusier and Martin Heidegger, whose divergent conceptions of modernist architecture will constitute the axis of this paper – a utopian project of social engineering, on the one hand, and a slightly reactionary stance encapsulated in Heidegger’s concept of “dwelling” on the other.

Does knowledge, as a system of thought and as a form of representation,
absorb the simultaneous necessity (and instability) of materiality
in a parallel fashion? More specifically, is systematized knowledge
necessarily ‘further from’ materiality than representation even if the latter is potentially ‘without’ a thinker while the former cannot
be? Or, put more simply, is systematicity or self-reflection more alien
to matter? Georges Bataille and Robert Smithson, in their respective
epigraphs above, deploy knowledge and materiality in order to prove
their structural weakness, they deploy their respective terms in ablative,
or outright suicidal, means.

The confluence of spatiality and identity has been one of the central issues in psychogeographical research. J.G. Ballard’s fiction offers a valuable entry point into such considerations, especially when viewed alongside theoretical developments in the field of spatiality studies. In approaching the topic of identity disintegration in Ballard’s High Rise and Concrete Island, this article attempts to present the complicit role the environment plays in self-determination. Though psychoanalysis has traditionally served as the first-line approach to Ballard’s work, spatiality studies offers an invaluable theoretical context, in which to further flesh out relationship that exists between the alienation, violence and isolation experienced by the characters and the particular environment they find themselves occupying.

James Graham Ballard (1930-2009) è stato uno degli scrittori più eclettici e visionari del nostro tempo, autore di alcuni romanzi di culto come "High Rise" (1975), "Crash" (1973) e "The Atrocity Exhibition" (1970). Intersecando alcune delle linee teoriche tracciate da Jean Baudrillard, questo saggio si concentra proprio su quest'ultima opera, capolavoro della sperimentazione letteraria post-moderna in lingua inglese. "The Atrocity Exhibition" introduce alcuni dei temi cardine della successiva produzione dell'autore e ha il merito di spostare l'attenzione della produzione fantascientifica sul presente piuttosto che su un ipotetico futuro, mettendo in rilievo le profonde contraddizioni della società dei consumi.

In a recently published manuscript, Henri Lefebvre develops the notion of an “architecture of enjoyment” (l’architecture de la jouissance). Surprisingly, he does not mention Jacques Lacan, although it was Lacan who originally introduced the term jouissance to academic discourse. This chapter uses this previously unknown manuscript of Lefebvre as a unique starting point to exemplify a different reading of Lefebvre and Lacan. Pohl discusses the basics of their notions of enjoyment, while giving special attention to the latter’s political implications and ways to grasp architecture in its relation to the production of space. Finally, Pohl’s chapter seeks to outline the possi- bilities of an architectural enjoyment. By focusing on vertical architectures, particularly Ballard’s novel High-Rise and a 2014 Frankfurt building deto- nation, Pohl’s claim is that a discussion of Lefebvre and Lacan can assist in grasping architectural enjoyment to better understand the utopian fantasies and the constitutive lacking structure that haunts a building.

J.G. Ballard's 2004 novel Millennium People is a post-modern detective dystopia that investigates a political uprising among the intellectual middle class in the gated community of Chelsea Marina, London. It employs a retrospective narration told by the protagonist, David Markham, who initially has the intention to investigate his ex-wife's death in the Heathrow airport bombing. As he meets the paediatrician Dr. Richard Gould and former college film studies lecturer Kay Churchill, however, he gets seduced by the allure of violence that the rebels offer, forgets his initial aim and participates in acts of meaningless terrorism. In this novel, Ballard not only demonstrates the relation between violence and community but also the meaninglessness of terrorism whose intention is to change the dynamics of the law and state. This paper will demonstrate the way Ballard depicts the pointlessness of violent actions in transforming the dynamics of certain social and political conditions of a society. Moreover, it will emphasize on Ballard's concept that violence is at the heart of social communities; it is the repressed desire of people that are subjected to the power of authorities.

This book proposes a new interdisciplinary approach to the literary representations of London by means of correlating geocriticism, spatial literary studies and memory studies in order to investigate the interplay between reality and fiction in mapping the urban imaginary. It conducts an analysis of London in British literature published between 1975-2005, exploring the literary representations of the real urban restructurings prompted by the rebuilding projects in war and poverty-stricken districts of London, the remapping of the metropolis by immigrants, the gentrification and displacement of communities, as well as the urban dissolution caused by terrorism. The selected works of fiction written by Peter Ackroyd, Penelope Lively, Zadie Smith, Andrea Levy, J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Doris Lessing and Ian McEwan provide a record of the city in times of de/reconstruction, emphasizing the structure of London as a palimpsest, which becomes a central image. The book contributes to the development of the subject field by introducing a number of original concepts (mythopos, mnemotopos, landguage, entropic habitus, urban specularity) which connect geocriticism and memory studies. The originality of this book consists in its innovative contribution to literary studies and dynamic interdisciplinary approach which attracts a wide spectrum of interest across emerging research fields in the humanities and beyond.

J. G. Ballard was one of the most original writers of the postwar era. Although he has drawn considerable attention from scholars across various fields, the character of his political thinking remains a puzzle. He has been claimed as both a radical and a conservative, while others suggest that his work expresses no distinct political stance. Drawing on a wide range of source materials, I argue that from the 1960s to the early years of the twenty-first century Ballard developed a bold and intriguing account of liberalism grounded in insights drawn from surrealism and Freudian psychoanalysis. It was, I contend, an idiosyncratic version of the liberalism of fear. The article analyses Ballard's sociopolitical vision, focusing in particular on his account of human nature, social reality, totalitarianism, and the power of the imagination.

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As an ethical and aesthetic mandate for the new millenium, the Cold War repression of Hiroshima within the American political imaginary needs to be symbolically confronted and undone at national as well as global levels. As Americans and as Japanese citizens of the liberal global order, we must mutually move beyond the Cold War situation of historical repression that had obtained in 1965, when novelist Kenzaburo Ōe lamented, "To put the matter plainly and bluntly, people everywhere on this earth are trying to forget Hiroshima and the unspeakable tragedy perpetrated there." However traumatic, Americans and their allies must try to remember this Hiroshima sublime as a trauma of geopolitical domination and racialized hegemony across the Pacific Ocean. By thinking through and re-imagining the techno-euphoric grandeur of this Hiroshima sublime, as well as representing the ideological complicity of ordinary Americans in their own sublime (raptured by these technological forces of sublimity as manifesting and globally installing Patriot missiles as signs of their global supremacy) and ordinary Japanese (citizens of the Empire of the Sun fascinated by self-sublation into zeros of solar force) in the production of this nuclear sublime, we can begin to mutually recognize that a 'post-nuclear' era offers new possibilities and symbolic ties between America and Japan as Pacific powers. This post-nuclear era emerges out of World War II freighted with terror and wonder as a double possibility: at once urging the globe towards annihilation and yet also towards transactional and dialogical unity at the transnational border of national self-imagining. The phobic masochism of the sublime can no longer operate in a transnational world of global/local linkages, although the technological sublimity of the Persian Gulf War had suggested otherwise, with its "sublime Patriot" missiles and quasi-nuclear landscapes lingering in the world deserts from Iraq and Afganistan to Nevada and North Korea.

Cette communication se propose d’analyser la représentation de la Guerre du Vietnam, spécifiquement durant la phase d’intervention des Etats-Unis (1964-1973), dans différentes productions néo-avant-gardistes. Seront ainsi confrontées des œuvres de diverses aires linguistiques qui impliquent une hybridité générique reposant sur une rencontre entre le texte et l’image. L’étude comparée sera faite à partir de quatre auteurs dont les pratiques poétiques, que nous qualifierons d’ « expérimentales », semblent être des moyens pour s’engager contre un conflit ravageur : Emmett Williams, poète concret puis artiste fluxus, américain, originaire du pays critiqué et dénoncé  ; J. G. Ballard, écrivain britannique, qui fonde dans sa nouvelle Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A une représentation originale de la guerre et Eugenio Miccini (Viaggio tra le nuvole) et Ketty La Rocca (Bianco Napalm) qui tous deux appartiennent au Gruppo 70 dont l’engagement et la prise de position sur certains événements politiques furent essentiels à la création du groupe artistique et littéraire florentin relevant de la poesia visiva italienne.
Notre hypothèse de recherche est que le statut médiatique de la Guerre du Vietnam se traduit dans l’élaboration même des dispositifs commentés. En effet, cette guerre peut s’analyser comme le premier phénomène médiatique d’ampleur en tant que celle-ci mobilisa l’opinion publique : les journalistes étaient présents sur les lieux du conflit, transmettaient les informations et permettaient la diffusion des images de la guerre. Des mouvements de protestation furent alors organisés pour dénoncer d’une part la violence des combats et les importantes pertes civiles, d’autre part l’impérialisme américain. Nous verrons ainsi que les œuvres choisies font dialoguer lisible et visible et font du livre, de la page et du poème un espace intermédiatique et ce grâce à, d’une part, la rupture de la linéarité par des dispositifs de fragmentation et d’éclatement du texte et, d’autre part, à travers l’intégration d’images ou d’éléments non littéraires. Cet interstice où se rencontrent le lisible et le visible sera mis en perspective avec le montage dialectique qu’évoque Jacques Rancière dans Le Destin des images (2003) et sera évalué comme une potentialité critique et éthique de la création.

J.G. Ballard's The Concentration City and Billennium are both short stories that depict an utterly dystopian vision about the future of urban development. The Concentration City provides a glimpse of an overgrown, gigantic city with no limits whereas Billennium presents a perspective of the burden of living in an overpopulated society. Both stories are projections of the megalopolis as coined by philosophers Patrick Geddes and Lewis Mumford. These thinkers have outlined the notion of megalopolis as the final stage of development before necropolis, city of the dead. This paper explores how and in what ways Ballard's vision of megalopolis is reflected in The Concentration City and Billennium. To that end, the effects of megalopolis on the individual, nature, society and government institutions are revealed. In addition, the paper also demonstrates that human liberty is restricted on all accounts as a consequence of the conditions created by the megalopolis. Finally, as put forward by Geddes and Mumford, regionalism is proposed as an alternative to prevent excessive urban development which is destined to lead to megalopolis and ultimately, collective downfall.

In his landmark work, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China 1930-45, Leo Oufan Lee ends the book with an ode to the past glory of Shanghai and an anticipation of the thriving financial centre and cosmopolis, Hong Kong, as a transformed continuation of old-time Shanghai. For Lee, the tale of these two cities is essentially concerned with and illustrates a particular type of translocal urban culture in China.

Shanghai’s capacity to be all at once a space of negotiation, domination, and appropriation, prompted Mu Xin (木心 1927-2011), the eminent Chinese diaspora writer, to refer to what Lee understands to be the “flowering of Shanghai modern” as “deformed splendour”. In its time old Shanghai had the reputation of being the most “open” city in the world, the one place in China that was free from the control of a debilitated and bureaucratic state apparatus, giving it an air of freedom that drew in both political reformers and intellectuals, both prostitutes and adventurers.

The other side of this freedom and openness, however, was a certain isolation—a linkage to the world that went together with a de-linkage from the rest of China. There was always something very fragile about Shanghai cosmopolitanism. After 1949, Chinese communism, born in Shanghai, quickly made Shanghai’s urban culture no more than a memory.

In Hong Kong, there was little interest in nationalism. Hong Kong could never have been a city nation like Singapore, but only a hyphenation, a concept that Abbas adopts to refer not to the conjunctures of ‘East’ and ‘West’, but to the disjunctures of colonialism and globalism. It therefore accepted its colonial status as a priori and turned towards the international, fully exploiting its position as a port city or, in Mao’s picturesque phraseology, as “a pimple on the backside of China”.

As Abbas argues, if colonialism in Hong Kong had a certain benign-looking aspect to it, it was because it was a mutant political entity and a living demonstration of how the relative autonomy that comes from economic success could be based on dependency. While Shanghai was multiple and polyvalent, Hong Kong was single and paradoxical.

Considering the growing conflicts on a civil level between the mainland and Hong Kong, some, including local public intellectual Leung Man-tao and activist organisation Co-China, argue that Hong Kong should not lose the principles and morals that made it unique, that instead of the growing sense of hostility and exclusivity towards the torrent of tourists and immigrants from the mainland, Hongkongers may want to exhibit openness, kindness and equal fairness: the fruit of civil society.

Simultaneously, we see the dramatic move of a Chinese official tearing out a single-page advertisement for Taiwan’s Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange at the 20th conference of the European Association of Chinese Studies (EACS). It seems that at a time when nationalism and localism are both emerging, such cosmopolitan spirit should perhaps be reflected upon and rekindled.