Ballard, Sexual Landscapes and Nature
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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. -
JG Ballard's Reappraisal of Space
Keyes: J.G. Ballard’s Reappraisal of Space 48 From a ‘metallized Elysium’ to the ‘wave of the future’: J.G. Ballard’s Reappraisal of Space Jarrad Keyes Independent Scholar _____________________________________ Abstract: This essay argues that the ‘concrete and steel’ trilogy marks a pivotal moment in Ballard’s intellectual development. From an earlier interest in cities, typically London, Crash ([1973] 1995b), Concrete Island (1974] 1995a) and High-Rise ([1975] 2005) represent a threshold in Ballard’s spatial representations, outlining a critique of London while pointing the way to a suburban reorientation characteristic of his later works. While this process becomes fully realised in later representations of Shepperton in The Unlimited Dream Company ([1979] 1981) and the concept of the ‘virtual city’ (Ballard 2001a), the trilogy makes a number of important preliminary observations. Crash illustrates the roles automobility and containerisation play in spatial change. Meanwhile, the topography of Concrete Island delineates a sense of economic and spatial transformation, illustrating the obsolescence of the age of mechanical reproduction and the urban form of the metropolis. Thereafter, the development project in High-Rise is linked to deindustrialisation and gentrification, while its neurological metaphors are key markers of spatial transformation. The essay concludes by considering how Concrete Island represents a pivotal text, as its location demonstrates. Built in the 1960s, the Westway links the suburban location of Crash to the West with the Central London setting of High-Rise. In other words, Concrete Island moves athwart the new economy associated with Central London and the suburban setting of Shepperton, the ‘wave of the future’ as envisaged in Ballard’s works. -
"Resurrected from Its Own Sewers": Waste, Landscape and the Environment in JG Ballard's Climate Novels Set in Junky
"Resurrected from its own sewers": Waste, landscape and the environment in JG Ballard's climate novels Set in junkyards, abandoned waysides and disaster zones, J.G. Ballard’s fiction assumes waste to be integral to the (material and symbolic) post-war landscape, and to reveal discomfiting truths about the ecological and social effects of mass production and consumption. Nowhere perhaps is this more evident than in his so- called climate novels, The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1965), originally published as The Burning World, and The Crystal World (1966)—texts which Ballard himself described as “form[ing] a trilogy.” 1 In their forensic examination of the ecological effects of the Anthropocene era, these texts at least superficially fulfil the task environmental humanist Kate Rigby sees as paramount for eco-critics and writers of speculative fiction alike: that is, they tell the story of our volatile environment in ways that will productively inform our responses to it, and ultimately enable “new ways of being and dwelling” (147; 3). This article explores Ballard’s treatment of waste and material devastation in The Drowned World, The Drought, and The Crystal World, focussing specifically on their desistance from critiquing industrial modernity, and their exploitation, instead, of the narrative potential of its deleterious effects. I am especially interested in examining the relationship between the three novels, whose strikingly similar storylines approach ecological catastrophe from multiple angles. To this end, I refrain from discussing Ballard’s two other climate novels, The Wind from Nowhere (1962), which he himself dismissed outright as a “piece of hackwork” he wrote in the space of a day, and Hello America (1981), which departs from the 1960s texts in its thematic structure (Sellars and O’Hara, 88). -
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. -
18-Resenha-Pedro Groppo.P65
SELLARS, SIMON; O’HARA, DAN (ORG.). EXTREME METAPHORS: SELECTED INTERVIEWS WITH J. G. BALLARD, 1967-2008. LONDON: FOURTH ESTATE, 2012. 510 P. Pedro Groppo* Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG) “Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessel are the written mythologies of memory and desire,” wrote J. G. Ballard (1930-2009), a man who, since his beginnings in science fiction magazines in the 1950s, has painted the postwar world as a disaster area. Within his unique, idiosyncratic blend of surrealism and science fiction lays a kernel of trauma: memories of his wartime experience in a POW camp outside Shanghai, displaced into strange and indelible Ballardian images of drained swimming pools, deserted paddy fields, and a fascination with airports and aircraft. Arguably, Ballard’s project of elucidating our changing attitudes and transformation of our landscape by mass media and consumerism in the second half of the 20th century is tied to a process of cultural and personal remembrance. The disaster in Ballard’s fiction has already occurred, and attempts to grasp the implications of the atomic age for better or worse—the dropping of the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as he recounts in his autobiography Miracles of Life (2008, the title refers to his three children) saved him from being executed by the Japanese at the end of the war. After his induction into the mainstream in the mid-1980s with the publication of the prized Empire of the Sun (1984) and its subsequent film adaptation by Steven Spielberg (1987), it is easy to forget that for almost three decades, his experiences in the Second World War appeared only as metaphors in his writing, events that, as he often said, took him a long time to forget, and an even longer time to remember. -
Is Dead: JG Ballard's Post-Humanist Myths of the Near Future
”Sex(ual identity) Is Dead : J.G. Ballard’s Post-Humanist Myths of the Near Future,” Didier Girard To cite this version: Didier Girard. ”Sex(ual identity) Is Dead : J.G. Ballard’s Post-Humanist Myths of the Near Future,”. ESSE 6, Aug 2002, starsbourg, France. halshs-02568862 HAL Id: halshs-02568862 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-02568862 Submitted on 10 May 2020 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Out of nowhere, To Jovan Kostov, Topsy-turvy. Sex (ual identity) is Dead : J. G. Ballard’s Post-Humanist Myths of the Near Future Didier Girard Je marchais fier parmi les héros, Le ciel brillait d’étoiles, Et une étoile, comme un héros du ciel d’Anou Est tombée vers moi. J’ai voulu la porter, elle était trop lourde. J’ai voulu la pousser, je n’ai pu la bouger. Autour d’elle, les gens du pays s’assemblaient Et lui baisaient les pieds. Je l’ai aimée et je me suis penchée sur elle Comme on se penche sur une femme Je l’ai soulevée et déposée à tes pieds Et toi tu l’as rendue égale à moi. -
F14 UK-Catalogue.Pdf
Harper UK Adult Fall 2014 Running Wild J. G. Ballard, Adam Phillips Summary A highsecurity luxury housing estate in the Thames Valley is the setting for a disturbing outbreak of violence in this compelling novella from the acclaimed author of 'Cocaine Nights' and 'SuperCannes'. Pangbourne Village housing estate is exclusive, expensive and protected from the outside world by the very latest in security systems. It should be the perfect place to bring up a child. So why, in the space of ten minutes early one morning, were the thirtytwo adult residents brutally murdered, and all thirteen children abducted? No kidnapper has ever come forward, and the police are mystified. It is only when psychiatrist Richard Greville is called in that the truth behind the massacre gradually becomes clear… Contributor Bio J. G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, where his father was a businessman. After internment in a civilian prison camp, he and his family returned to England in 1946. He published his first novel, The Drowned World, in 1961. His 1984 bestseller Empire of the Fourth Estate Sun won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was 9780006548195 shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His memoir Miracles of Life was published in 2008. J. G. 0006548199 Ballard died in 2009. Pub Date: 9/2/2014 On Sale Date: 9/2/2014 Ship Date: 8/22/2014 Quotes $17.99/$17.99 Can./£8.99 UK 'A tight, macabre tale…A wellconstructed and superbly written novella. As a malevolent Bformat Paperback gesture in the direction of facts we prefer to ignore, it provides a salutary chill.' 112 Pages Jonathan Coe, Guardian Fiction / Literary FIC019000 'In words as crisp as a wellcut film, Ballard's gripping story shocks middleclass 130.000 mm W | 197.000 mm H | 90.000 gr Wt assumptions to the roots.' Mail on Sunday 5.12in W | 7.76in H | 90gr Wt Status:ACTIVE 'Has the impact of a blackandwhite television documentary. -
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. -
The Drowned World' (1962): Psycho-Geographical Cli-Fi
J.G. Ballard's 'The Drowned World' (1962): Psycho-Geographical Cli-Fi Jim Clarke Accepted manuscript PDF deposited in Coventry University’s Repository Original citation: ‘J.G. Ballard's 'The Drowned World' (1962): Psycho-Geographical Cli-Fi’, in Cli-Fi: A Companion, ed. by Axel Goodbody and Adeline Johns-Putra, pub 2018 (ISBN 9781788740722) Publisher: Peter Lang Users of the material shall give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. They may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses the licensee or his/ her use. The material may not be used for commercial purposes. If a user remixes, transforms, or builds upon the material, he/she may not distribute the modified material. CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode Abstract: This article examines JG Ballard’s influential novel, The Drowned World (1962). Ballard’s novel has often been proposed as either the first expression of climate change in fiction, or else as a weighty precursor to cli-fi as it is currently understood. However, when Ballard wrote the novel, one of four early fictions in which he posits a planet-wide environmental catastrophe, the understanding that climate change could have an anthropogenic component was not common. Ballard’s novel plays with the established pulp format of catastrophe fiction while also introducing his concept of ‘inner space’, the psychological landscape which drives his protagonists through devolving biospheres and declining climates. Ballard’s novel reveals how humans react to climate disaster when, crucially, it is not their fault. -
Download This PDF File
Special Issue Ballard’s Island: Histories, Modernities and Materialities Guest Editors Alexander Beaumont Daryl Martin Beaumont and Martin: Ballard’s Island 2 Introduction Alexander Beaumont York St. John University Daryl Martin University of York _____________________________________ Abstract: This special issue brings together contributions from cultural geographers, design historians and literary scholars analysing J.G. Ballard’s 1974 novel Concrete Island (Ballard 2008), in order to situate it within its historical and political contexts and to consider its relevance to contemporary debates on architecture, landscape and cultural practice. Separately and together, the articles gathered here, inter alia, trace the literary genealogies of the novel; illuminate the historical and political contexts that the novel comments on; explicate the ambivalences of the various discursive and technological modernities acting within the narrative; focus on the distinctive island materialities which Ballard sketches throughout the text, and explore the heightened embodied sensibilities through which its architect protagonist, Maitland, navigates this unintentional landscape. In so doing, the articles collected here advance new readings of the novel that build on the extant Ballard literature, and the special issue as a whole reasserts the prominence of Concrete Island within the wider contexts of Ballard’s career and the culture of the period in which he was writing. We conclude by suggesting that Ballard’s novel presents us with an anamorphic portrait that complicates and strains contemporaneous narratives of English modernity, consumer culture and technological progress. Keywords: J.G. Ballard; Concrete Island; history; modernity; materiality Author contact: [email protected]; [email protected] Cover image (Figure 1): Ultimate City #2 (from the series Future Ruins) © Michelle Lord, reproduced with permission. -
Bibliography
BIBLIOGRAPHY Adorno, Theodor, ‘On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,’ in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, The Continuum Publishing Company, New York, 1982. Adorno, Theodor, The Stars Down to Earth, Routledge, Oxford, 1994. Als, Hilton, ‘Adaptation,’ Matthew Barney River of Fundament, Haus Der Kunst/Skira Rizzoli, New York, 2014. Amis, Martin, ‘Thoroughly Post-modern Millennium, Review of Mao II, by Don DeLillo,’ The Independent, September 8, 1991. Arkin, Marc M., ‘Song of Himself: Harold Bloom on God,’ The New Criterion, May 1992, http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Song-of-himself– Harold-Bloom-on-God-4568. Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, From Abraham to the Present: The 4000- Year Quest for God, Mandarin, London, 1994. Aslan, Reza, ‘Bill Maher Isn’t the Only One Who Misunderstands Religion,’ The New York Times, October 8, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/09/ opinion/bill-maher-isnt-the-only-one-who-misunderstands-religion. html?_r 0. = Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2006. Auster, Paul, ‘One-Man Language,’ The New York Review of Books, February 6, 1975, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1975/02/06/one-man-language/. Accessed March 21, 2016. Bakhtin, Mikhail, Discourse in the Novel, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1981. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), 283 under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 A. Crawford, Religious Imaging in Millennialist America, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99172-6 284 BIBLIOGRAPHY Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World, trans. -
J. G. Ballard: Visions and Revisions Also by Jeannette Baxter
J. G. Ballard: Visions and Revisions Also by Jeannette Baxter J. G. BALLARD: Contemporary Critical Perspectives J. G. BALLARD’S SURREALIST IMAGINATION Also by Rowland Wymer (∗published by Palgrave Macmillan) DEREK JARMAN SUICIDE AND DESPAIR IN THE JACOBEAN DRAMA WEBSTER AND FORD∗ THE ACCESSION OF JAMES I: Historical and Cultural Consequences (edited with Glenn Burgess and Jason Lawrence)∗ THE ICONOGRAPHY OF POWER: Ideas and Images of Rulership on the English Renaissance Stage (edited with György E. Szönyi) NEO-HISTORICISM: Studies in Renaissance Literature, History and Politics (edited with Robin Headlam Wells and Glenn Burgess) SHAKESPEARE AND HISTORY (edited with Holger Klein) J. G. Ballard: Visions and Revisions Edited by Jeannette Baxter and Rowland Wymer Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Jeannette Baxter and Rowland Wymer 2012 Chapters © individual contributors 2012 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-27812-7 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.