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Near Vermilion Sands: the Context and Date of Composition of an Abandoned Literary Draft by J. G. Ballard
Near Vermilion Sands: The Context and Date of Composition of an Abandoned Literary Draft by J. G. Ballard Chris Beckett ‘We had entered an inflamed landscape’1 When Raine Channing – ‘sometime international model and epitome of eternal youthfulness’2 – wanders into ‘Topless in Gaza’, a bio-fabric boutique in Vermilion Sands, and remarks that ‘Nothing in Vermilion Sands ever changes’, she is uttering a general truth about the fantastic dystopian world that J. G. Ballard draws and re-draws in his collection of stories set in and around the tired, flamboyant desert resort, a resort where traumas flower and sonic sculptures run to seed.3 ‘It’s a good place to come back to,’4 she casually continues. But, like many of the female protagonists in these stories – each a femme fatale – she is a captive of her past: ‘She had come back to Lagoon West to make a beginning, and instead found that events repeated themselves.’5 Raine has murdered her ‘confidant and impresario, the brilliant couturier and designer of the first bio-fabric fashions, Gavin Kaiser’.6 Kaiser has been killed – with grim, pantomime karma – by a constricting gold lamé shirt of his own design: ‘Justice in a way, the tailor killed by his own cloth.’7 But Kaiser’s death has not resolved her trauma. Raine is a victim herself, a victim of serial plastic surgery, caught as a teenager in Kaiser’s doomed search for perpetual gamin youth: ‘he kept me at fifteen,’ she says, ‘but not because of the fashion-modelling. He wanted me for ever when I first loved him.’8 She hopes to find in Vermilion Sands, in its localized curvature of time and space, the parts of herself she has lost on a succession of operating tables. -
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A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of Warwick Permanent WRAP URL: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/110900 Copyright and reuse: This thesis is made available online and is protected by original copyright. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item for information to help you to cite it. Our policy information is available from the repository home page. For more information, please contact the WRAP Team at: [email protected] warwick.ac.uk/lib-publications THE BRITISH LIBRARY BRITISH THESIS SERVICE COPYRIGHT Reproduction of this thesis, other than as permitted under the United Kingdom Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under specific agreement with the copyright holder, is prohibited. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. REPRODUCTION QUALITY NOTICE Th e quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the original thesis. Whilst every effort has been made to ensure the highest quality of reproduction, some pages which contain small or poor printing may not reproduce well. Previously copyrighted material (journal articles, published texts etc.) is not reproduced. THIS THESIS HAS BEEN REPRODUCED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED FLATLINE CONSTRUCTS: GOTHIC MATERIALISM AND CYBERNETIC THEORY-FICTION Mark Fisher Presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Philosophy University of Warwick July 1999 Numerous Originals in Colour Abstract FLATLINE CONSTRUCTS: GOTHIC MATERIALISM AND CYBERNETIC THEORY- FICTION Cyberpunk fiction has been called “the supreme literary expression, if not of postmodernism then of late capitalism itself.” (Jameson) This thesis aims to analyse and question this claim by rethinking cyberpunk Action, postmodernism and late capitalism in terms of three - interlocking - themes: cybernetics, the Gothic and fiction. -
Body and Space in J. G. Ballard's Concrete Island and High-Rise
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais Faculdade de Letras Pedro Henrique dos Santos Groppo Body and Space in J. G. Ballard’s Concrete Island and High-Rise Minas Gerais – Brasil Abril – 2009 Groppo 2 Acknowledgments I would like to thank Prof. Julio Jeha for the encouragement and support. He was always open and willing to make sense of my fragmentary and often chaotic ideas. Also, thanks to CNPq for the financial support. And big thanks to the J. G. Ballard online community, whose creativity and enthusiasm towards all things related to Ballard were captivating. Groppo 3 Abstract The fiction of J. G. Ballard is unusually concerned with spaces, both internal and exterior. Influenced by Surrealism and Freudian psychoanalysis, Ballard’s texts explore the thin divide between mind and body. Two of his novels of the 1970s, namely Concrete Island (1974) and High-Rise (1975) depict with detail his preoccupation with how the modern, urban world pushes man to the point where an escape to inner world is the solution to the tacit and oppressive forces of the external world. This escape is characterized by a suspension of conventional morality, with characters expressing atavistic tendencies, an effective return of the repressed. The present thesis poses a reading of these two novels, aided by analyses of some of Ballard’s short stories, with a focus on the relation between bodies and spaces and how they project and introject into one another. Such a reading is grounded on theories of the uncanny as described by Freud and highlights Ballard’s kinship to Gothic fiction. -
The Complete Stories: V. 2 Ebook
THE COMPLETE STORIES: V. 2 PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Isaac Asimov | 464 pages | 20 Mar 2012 | HarperCollins Publishers | 9780006480167 | English | London, United Kingdom The Complete Stories: v. 2 PDF Book A teenage horror buff is so smitten with a sexy classmate that he helps her use black magic on their loathsome English teacher, with shocking and bewildering results. Another adventure begins. Warner Bros. Recombine in every possible way. Don't expect too much kindness from Mr Dahl though -- the man must have had more than his fair share of demons to exorcise. From the very beginning technological innovation has replaced the delineated notion of "place" with an increasing number of meaningless, formless "spaces. Bates imposes a curfew in the open city of Los Angeles in an attempt to curb resistance activity; Donovan and Ham make plans to hit a Visitors' conference. Domestic Television Distribution. Dec 31, Ignatius Vonnegut rated it liked it. Will have to go out and buy this book as I have to give it back to the library. The women on their balconies are interchangable. Add the first question. Would recommend for those looking for excellent science fiction stories with a more literary bent. See 2 questions about The Complete Short Stories…. The one where two men conspire to sleep with each other's wives without the women's knowledge and therefore consent is hugely problematic and shouldn't be published without context, as it is done in the introduction for another story called 'Bitch'. Its title was inspired by a highly inaccurate and sensationalized article about the crash that blinded him, which claimed he had been shot down instead of simply having to land because of low fuel. -
Book Reviews: Beaumont 114 Richard Brown, Christopher Duffy and Elizabeth Stainforth (Eds) (2016) J.G. Ballard: Landscapes of To
Book reviews: Beaumont 114 Richard Brown, Christopher Duffy and Elizabeth Stainforth (eds) (2016) J.G. Ballard: Landscapes of Tomorrow. Brill. xii + 170 pp., € 85.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-90-04-31385-9. The stated aim of J.G. Ballard: Landscapes of Tomorrow is to ‘address the various kinds of landscapes in Ballard’s writing and respond to the “spatial turn” in the arts and humanities, which opens a rich new vista for the reading of narrative fiction’ (Brown, Duffy and Stainforth 2016: 1). Ballard's fiction is easily read in relation to the larger shift in attitudes towards the representation of spatiality that has occurred over the course of the last few decades. Its striking preoccupation with how space is imagined and produced, and how it occupies and reshapes the psyches of those who presume mastery over it, has been the source of critical fascination since at least the 1980s. In other ways, however, deploying the heuristics of the ‘spatial turn’ to understand Ballard's fiction poses a challenge, not least because it is so reflexively preoccupied with spatiality as to risk crowding out the critic altogether. Indeed, Ballard’s novels and short stories often subject their own landscapes to such insistent hermeneutic acts that they restrict the reader to the uncomfortable position of voyeur. In his late dystopias Cocaine Nights (1996) and Super-Cannes (2000), for instance, Ballard includes the seer-like characters Bobby Crawford and Wilder Penrose, who explain the spatial logics of their respective milieus in a way that is curiously disempowering, robbing both the reader and the detective-protagonists of these novels of their central critical function. -
Work, Leisure and Time in J. G. Ballard's the Drowned Worldand
PULSE: the Journal of Science and Culture — Volume 7 (2020) Christopher Webb1 A ‘CLOCK LESS URGENT’ Work, Leisure and Time in J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World and Vermilion Sands Abstract This article proposes that the deliberate com- post-industrial future and the resulting “sud- plication of time in J. G. Ballard’s early fiction— den onrush of leisure,” Ballard’s fictions go be- specificallyVermilion Sands and The Drowned yond a simple critique of what an all-permis- World—responds to a certain shift in mid- sive leisure society might look like. Instead, twentieth-century evaluations of work and they prod and unsettle the notion of linear leisure. It suggests that the characters who time and, by doing so, force us to confront the populate Ballard’s early fictions can be read essential weirdness behind what we consider as displaced and disorientated late-capitalist to be the ‘normal’ experience of time. subjects, whose experience of time is trans- formed by the ‘weird’ temporality of the land- scapes in which they find themselves. Written Key words: J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World, at a time when many were concerned about a Vermilion Sands, work, leisure, time 1 A ‘CLOCK LESS URGENT’ by Christopher Webb INTRODUCTION All my own fiction could be regarded as an attempt to escape from time—or, more exactly, from linear time, as it seems to me . the most significant relationships and experiences of our lives are intelligible only in non-linear terms. — J. G. Ballard2 During the mid-twentieth century, across the U.S. and western Europe, there were a number of critical attempts to re-examine the traditional ideas, assump- tions, and attitudes associated with work and leisure. -
The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard Free
FREE THE COMPLETE STORIES OF J. G. BALLARD PDF J. G. Ballard,Martin Amis | 1216 pages | 21 Sep 2009 | WW Norton & Co | 9780393072624 | English | New York, United States The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard (Hardcover) | Porter Square Books Back to the "Collecting J. Ballard" Home Page. I have The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard the same approach to collections of Ballard's short stories as for his novels. That is, I have listed both U. I have also listed a small number of other editions that are of particular interest. Where a collection was first published in paperback format, it may well have been re- printed by the same publisher at a later date. Usually, the re- print will be recognizable because the artwork on the front cover will be completely different from the first printing. For details of which stories were included in each collection, see here. The first collection of Ballard's short stories, whose only publication was in a U. There was a later reprintwhich had a completely different cover. Note that the title The Voices of Time was used for an entirely different U. A second collection from Berkley inagain only ever issued as a U. The first collection published in the U. The first edition was a hardback from Gollancz inand contained eight stories, of which two including 'The Voices of Time' had appeared in the U. A second edition appeared from Gollancz in with two stories being changed; this later version now contained three stories in common with The Voices of Time and Other Stories. -
J. G. Ballard and Making: an Experiment in Collaborative Practice
Open Cultural Studies 2019; 3: 579-590 Introduction Beth White, Thomas Knowles* J. G. Ballard and Making: An Experiment in Collaborative Practice https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2019-0051 Received September 27, 2019; accepted Outline of project “J. G. Ballard and Making” was an eight-week collaborative project that ran in the second semester of 2017 at Birmingham City University. It brought together students and lecturers from the schools of English and Fashion & Textiles with the open brief of responding creatively to Ballard’s collection of short stories Vermilion Sands (1971). The students collaborated on a series of creative responses to Ballard’s work including collage images and sculptures that they presented at “J. G. Ballard Day” (JGB Day) in June 2017. The students also designed and printed a programme to showcase their work and to introduce the conference speakers. In this introductory essay, we explore the concept of making in some of Ballard’s key texts; we sketch some of the pedagogical methods and techniques employed on the project, such as the exquisite corpse; we discuss some of the challenges and rewards encountered in responding creatively to Vermilion Sands; and finally introduce the essays that make up this collection. Throughout this essay, and in-between the articles that follow, you will find images of the collages, sculptures and designs that the students produced for the project. Why J. G. Ballard? The works of the post-war British author J. G. Ballard might seem an odd fulcrum for a collaborative project; the erstwhile science fiction (sf) writer and literary provocateur famously populates his works with eccentrics and loners, Byronic heroes, decadents, dreamers, and false prophets. -
Science (And) Fiction in Ballard's Vermilion Sands
Science (and) Fiction in Ballard’s Vermilion Sands by C. Bruna Mancini ABSTRACT: Science, technology, and the (futuristic and surreal) uses of them are undoubtably essential elements in Ballard’s writing. His scientific language is both very elaborate and refined. Sometimes, it attains a metafictional mode, while it allows for an accurate discourse on (New Wave) science fiction, art, and narration. In Vermilion Sands, a collection of short stories published in 1971, Ballard describes this overlit place as an exotic suburb of the mind, and of the future. In Vermilion Sands, trauma flowers, singing plants, non-aural music, sound jewelry, automated poetry machines, sonic sculptures, self-painting canvasses, psychotropic houses are the psychological drives in these macabre, grotesque, and strange psychodramas. In this paper, I will analyze how science and technology contribute to build neural landscapes through a metanarrative perspective in Vermilion Sands. KEY WORDS: Science; fiction VS reality; sf; technology; chronotope; surrealism Saggi/Ensayos/Essais/Essays N. 24 – 11/2020 ISSN 2035-7680 362 SCIENCE (AND) FICTION IN BALLARD Science, technology, and the futuristic/surreal uses of them are essential elements in Ballard’s writing. In his “Notes from Nowhere,” published in the literary magazine New Worlds (October 1966), the author affirmed that, in his own perspective, science fiction was deeply concerned with the immediate present in terms of the future, and requires narrative techniques that reflect its subject matter. He depicts a near future studded with endless highways, deserted high-rises, abandoned shopping centers, flooded or charred cities, dried up lakes and seas. It is an apocalyptic world on the brink of collapse. -
Romanticism and Vermilion Sands
chapter 2 Aeolian Harps in the Desert: Romanticism and Vermilion Sands Thomas Knowles Abstract This chapter explores the legacy of Romanticism in J.G. Ballard’s Vermilion Sands, and the presence of that collection in The Atrocity Exhibition’s “The Summer Cannibals.” Drawing upon the aesthetic theory of Wordsworth’s “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, as well as the literary criticism of M.H. Abrams, it reads the sonic sculptures and singing statues of Vermilion Sands as warped reincarnations of the Romantic Aeolian harp, played upon by the wind and by the lamia-like muses that figure in each story. Keywords J.G. Ballard – Vermilion Sands – Romanticism – Aesthetics – Sublime – the death of affect – imagination J.G. Ballard describes Vermilion Sands (1971) variously as “an exotic suburb of [his] mind”; “between Arizona and Ipanema Beach”; and as part of the “3,000 mile-long linear city that stretches from Gibraltar to Glyfada Beach” (vs 7). The resorts of Vermilion Sands, Red Beach and Lagoon West are at once otherworldly and familiar, evoking Mediterranean sun-drenched vil- las and apartment complexes as well as the dreamscapes of Surrealism and, I would suggest, the Romanticism of English poetry. Supernatural elements of the landscape take the form of jewelled insects, sand rays, singing statues and sonic sculptures, as well as sentient architecture and clothing, and lamia-like faded screen actresses and heiresses. Surrounded by sand seas, multi-coloured sand reefs and fused lakes, the natural world is as exhausted as its beach- fatigued human residents. The denizens and visitors of Vermilion Sands are affectless, bored, capricious and always on the lookout for new ways to stimulate their decadent imaginations. -
The Papers of J. G. Ballard at the British Library
The Progress of the Text: The Papers of J. G. Ballard at the British Library Chris Beckett ‘My real luggage is rarely locked’ The opening scene of Cocaine Nights takes place at the edge of a stretch of no-man’s land, at the border between Gibraltar and Spain. Charles Prentice, travel writer, waits impatiently in a queue of traffic, behind a mud-stained van transporting boxes of ‘pinkly naked’ plastic dolls with ‘rocking blue eyes’.1 He is about to drive along the Spanish coast to the town of Marbella where his brother Frank is being held in custody, on multiple charges of murder, as Prentice will soon learn. A soldier with ‘heavy hands’ from the Guardia Civil fumbles amongst the watching dolls, searching for contraband, before turning his officious attention to the larger prize of a coach of migrant workers from Tangiers. Unsettled, Prentice is eventually waved on and follows the van towards La Linea, its ‘rear doors swinging and the dolls dancing together with their feet in the air’.2 A ‘virtually innocent traveller’ (despite his profession), Charles Prentice’s only contraband is his ‘daydream’ of rescuing his brother and smuggling him across the border.3 For all that Ballard conveys the transitory bustle of a border town, and quickly sketches the narrow streets and ‘quaint tea-rooms’ that replicate a corner of an imaginary provincial England, we know from the first paragraph of Cocaine Nights that what is being established as the novel’s ground note is a mood of transgression and guilt. The resonant assertion of the novel’s first sentence – ‘Crossing borders is my profession’ – is quickly qualified by Prentice’s admission that his employment is ‘little more than a masquerade’. -
Interview with James Graham Ballard (Shepperton, 21 January 1997)
Interview with James Graham Ballard (Shepperton, 21 January 1997) Francesca Guidotti University of Bergamo, Italy Citation: James Graham Ballard / Francesca Guidotti, “Interview with James Graham Ballard (Shepperton, 21 January 1997)”, Spaces of Utopia: An Electronic Journal, no. 7, 2009, pp. 15-33 <http://ler.letras.up.pt > ISSN 1646- 4729. James Graham Ballard died last April at the age of 78. He was described by David Pringle as “one of the most strikingly original English writers of the past half- century” and praised for his capacity to engage in different genres and fields – from science-fiction to avant-garde experimentation, from mainstream novels to crime fiction – “while remaining instantly recognisable” for his recurrent themes, his images, and his style (Pringle 2009). This interview was held on 21st January, 1997, a few months after the publication of the novel Cocaine Nights, the first of a supposed tetralogy of detective stories (including the later Super-Cannes, Millennium People and Kingdom Come). I met Ballard in Shepperton, in the small semi-detached house where he had lived for nearly four decades and from where he observed the world, by then virtually in a state of seclusion. We chatted freely, drinking white wine and sitting in front of the copy of a Delvaux painting; on the walls, two posters of the movie Crash directed by Cronenberg and whole shelves full of books with the name of famous painters on their covers. Spaces of Utopia 7 | 2009 . 16 A part of the interview was then translated into Italian and published in the literary journal Linea d’Ombra.