Download or read book J G Ballard s Surrealist Imagination written by Jeannette Baxter and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2009 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making the case that J. G. Ballard's fiction 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. A very different portrait of Ballard emerges, one that has implications for our understanding of post-war history and culture, the role of the reader and the function of the written text within a predominantly visual culture.
Download or read book J G Ballard s Surrealist Imagination written by Jeannette Baxter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Unlimited Dream Company A Novel written by J. G. Ballard and published by Liveright. This book was released on 2013-05-20 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A remarkable piece of invention, a flight from the world of the familiar and the real into the exotic universe of dream and desire." —New York Times Book Review When a light aircraft crashes into the Thames at Shepperton, the young pilot who struggles to the surface minutes later seems to have come back from the dead. Within hours everything in the dormitory suburb is transformed. Vultures invade rooftops, luxuriant tropical vegetation overruns the quiet avenues, and the local inhabitants are propelled by the young man’s urgent visions through ecstatic sexual celebrations toward an apocalyptic climax. In this characteristically inventive novel Ballard displays to devastating effect the extraordinary imagination that has established him as one of the twentieth century’s most visionary writers.
Download or read book The Crystal World written by J. G. Ballard and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2012-06-28 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book J G Ballard written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-07-18 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative volume of interdisciplinary essays on the significant British writer J. G. Ballard (1930-2009), exploring the physical, cultural and intertextual landscapes in several key novels with a central focus on The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), one of the most challenging texts in contemporary literature. Contributors include established critics of Ballard alongside newcomers. Different spatial concepts underpin the essays, from the landscapes of Ballard’s youth in Shanghai and his life in suburban London, to nuclear testing spaces and outer space exploration. Figurative locations typical of Ballard’s work are explored, including the beach, the motorway, the high-rise and the shopping mall. Textual spaces are explored through Ballard’s affiliation with modernist literary forms, including surrealist prose writing and collage, and poetic romanticism.
Download or read book The Psychological Fictions of J G Ballard written by Samuel Francis and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-06-20 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book A User s Guide to the Millennium written by J. G. Ballard and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1997-04-15 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of novelist's non-fiction writings spanning more than thirty years addresses topics including the arts, science, literature, popular culture, and his own life.
Download or read book J G Ballard written by D. Harlan Wilson and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2017-11-10 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prophetic short stories and apocalyptic novels like The Crystal World made J. G. Ballard a foundational figure in the British New Wave. Rejecting the science fiction of rockets and aliens, he explored an inner space of humanity informed by psychiatry and biology and shaped by surrealism. Later in his career, Ballard's combustible plots and violent imagery spurred controversy--even legal action--while his autobiographical 1984 war novel Empire of the Sun brought him fame. D. Harlan Wilson offers the first career-spanning analysis of an author who helped steer SF in new, if startling, directions. Here was a writer committed to moral ambiguity, one who drowned the world and erected a London high-rise doomed to descend into savagery--and coolly picked apart the characters trapped within each story. Wilson also examines Ballard's methods, his influence on cyberpunk, and the ways his fiction operates within the sphere of our larger culture and within SF itself.
Download or read book J G Ballard written by Jeannette Baxter and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2009-02-12 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: J.G. Ballard is one of the most significant British writers of the contemporary period. His award-winning novels are widely studied and read, yet the appeal of Ballard's idiosyncratic, and often controversial, imagination is such that his work also enjoys something of a cult status with the reading public. The hugely successful cinematic adaptations of Empire of the Sun (Spielberg, 1987) and Crash (Cronenberg, 1996) further confirm Ballard's unique place within the literary, cultural and popular imaginations. This guide includes new critical perspectives on Ballard's major novels as well as his short stories and journalistic writing covering issues of form, narrative and experimentation. Whilst offering fresh readings of dominant and recurring themes in Ballard's writing, including history, sexuality, violence, consumer capitalism, and urban space,the contributors also explore Ballard's contribution to major contemporary debates including those surrounding post 9/11 politics, terrorism, neo-imperialism, science, morality and ethics.
Download or read book The Day of Creation A Novel written by J. G. Ballard and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2012-05-21 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "As Dr. Mallory watches his clinic fail on the parched terrain of central Africa, he dreams of discovering a third Nile that will make the Sahara bloom. When there is a trickle on the local airstrip, and soon a river, the obsessed Mallory claims it as his own creation. Joined by Noon, a silent adolscent girl who as a child ran with the local guerrillas; Professor Sanger, a documentary filmmaker with a fading reputation; and Nora Warrer, the widow of a Rhodesian veterinary surgeon, the remains of whose menagerie flourish exotically amid the land's new fertility, Mallory sets out for the river's source."--Dust jacket.
Download or read book J G Ballard Visions and Revisions written by J. Baxter and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-11-10 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing an extensive reassessment of dominant and recurring themes in Ballard's writing, including historical violence, pornography, post 9/11 politics, and urban space, this book also engages with Ballard's 'late' modernism; his experimentation with style and form; and his sustained interests in psychology and psychopathology.
Download or read book The Empire s of J G Ballard written by David Ian Paddy and published by Gylphi Limited. This book was released on 2015-08-25 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: J. G. Ballard once declared that the most truly alien planet is Earth and in his science fiction he abandoned the traditional imagery of rocket ships traveling to distant galaxies to address the otherworldliness of this world. The Empires of J. G. Ballard is the first extensive study of Ballard's critical vision of nation and empire, of the political geography of this planet. Paddy examines how Ballard s self-perceived status as an outsider and exile, the Sheppertonian from Shanghai, generated an outlook that celebrated worldliness and condemned parochialism. This book brings to light how Ballard wrestled with notions of national identity and speculated upon the social and psychological implications of the post-war transformation of older models of empire into new imperialisms of consumerism and globalization. Presenting analyses of Ballard s full body of work with its tales of reverse colonization, psychological imperialism, the savagery of civilization, estranged Englishmen abroad and at home, and multinational communities built on crime, The Empires of J. G. Ballard offers a fresh perspective on the fiction of J. G. Ballard. The Empires of J.G. Ballard: An Imagined Geography offers a sustained and highly convincing analysis of the imperial and post-imperial histories and networks that shape and energise Ballard's fictional and non-fictional writings. To what extent can Ballard be considered an international writer? What happens to our understanding of his post-war science fictions when they are opened up to the language and logics of post-colonialism? And what creative and critical roles do the spectres of empire play in Ballard's visions of modernity? Paddy follows these and other fascinating lines of enquiry in a study that is not only essential reading for Ballard students and scholars, but for anyone interested in the intersections of modern and contemporary literature, history and politics. (Jeanette Baxter, Anglia Ruskin University) Shanghai made my father. Arriving in England after WW2, he was a person of the world who d witnessed extremes of human experience, and remained the outsider observing life from his home in Shepperton. 1930s Shanghai, Paris of the East , was a mix of international sophistication and violence, unfettered capitalism and acute poverty, American cars, martinis and Coca Cola, a place marked by death and war. It had a profound influence on my father and his imagination. Dr Paddy s fascinating book explores my father s fiction within an international context and offers a profound reading of a man who always kept his eyes and mind open to the world. (Fay Ballard)
Download or read book Miracles of Life Shanghai to Shepperton An Autobiography written by J. G. Ballard and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2013-02-04 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A final statement from the greatest clairvoyant of twentieth-century literature. Never before published in America, this revelatory autobiography—hailed as “fascinating [and] amazingly lucid” (Guardian)—charts the remarkable story of James Graham Ballard, a man described by Martin Amis as “the most original English writer of the last century.” Beginning with his Shanghai childhood, Miracles of Life guides us from the deprivations of Lunghua Camp during World War II, which provide the back story for his best-selling Empire of the Sun, to his arrival in war-torn England and his emergence as “the ideal chronicler of our disturbed modernity” (Observer). With prose of characteristic precision, Ballard movingly recalls his first attempts at science fiction, the 1970 American pulping of The Atrocity Exhibition—which sprang from his fascination with JFK conspiracy theories—and his life as a single father after the premature death of his wife. “This book should make yet more converts to a cause that Ballard’s devotees have been pleading for years” (Independent).
Download or read book J G Ballard written by Andrjez Gasiorek and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-30 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comprehensive account of the work of J.G. Ballard, regarded by several critics as one of the most significant fiction writers of recent times. Ballard's early science-fiction writing earned him plaudits as one of the most innovative and individual voices in the field, but his development as a writer has taken him far beyond the confines of any single genre. This book traces Ballard's career from his early science-fiction short stories and novels to his most recent work, particularly his timely reflections on the role of violence in contemporary social life. It argues that Ballard's writing is characterised by a distinctive vision of the post-war world and its possible futures, and suggests that his far-reaching analyses of the present age make him one of the indispensable commentators of our time.
Download or read book J G Ballard s Politics written by Florian Cord and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-01-23 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first sustained investigation of the political dimension in the work of J.G. Ballard. A product of and reaction to the cultural-socio-economic moment commonly designated as the postmodern condition, Ballard’s oeuvre is read as a continuous and developing meditation on the postmodern, examining it specifically as an expression of late capitalism. The book shows that at the heart of this meditation lies the question of resistance. Drawing on a wide range of concepts and ideas taken from the field of critical theory, it argues that in the face of a world marked by an unprecedented expansion of capital, in which modernity’s grand narratives have been invalidated and in which received forms of political struggle have lost their effectiveness, Ballard’s fiction commits itself to a deliberately irrational and extreme, pataphysical thought in order to develop a new discourse of resistance. Against past readings that have construed Ballard’s writing as non-political, decadent, or quietist, the study thus reveals Ballard as a thoroughly political author, committed to a subversive politics. In this way, the book also constitutes a timely intervention in the ongoing discussion concerning the nature and state of the political.
Download or read book Rushing to Paradise written by J. G. Ballard and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1996-04-15 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise and fall of a cult leader. After losing her medical license, Dr. Barbara Rafferty turns environmentalist to protest French nuclear testing in the Pacific. The campaign attracts media attention, money flows and she sets up a commune on an atoll, an experiment which ends in bloodshed
Download or read book Ian McEwan written by Sebastian Groes and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2009-07-19 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An up-to-date reader of critical essays on Ian McEwan by leading international academics, covering McEwan's most recent novels including Saturday, On Chesil Beach and an analysis of the film adaptation of Enduring Love.
