Terminal Atrocity Zone: Ballard: J.G. Ballard 1966-73 - Softcover

Stephen Barber; Jack Sargeant; Candice Black; J.G. Ballard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0985762519 ISBN 13: 9780985762513

Publisher: Sun Vision Press, 2013

Synopsis

Terminal Atrocity Zone examines a critical 7-year period in the work of author J G Ballard, ranging from 1966 to 1973. It includes a detailed overview of this period, with various original essays, and also with revealing interviews from the time in which Ballard discusses his work in depth; plus a section of works by Ballard, including: Coitus 80, the first surgical fiction

About this title

About the Author

J.G. Ballard (15 November 1930 - 19 April 2009) was an English novelist, short story writer, satirist, and essayist known for provocative works of speculative fiction which explored the relations between human psychology, technology, sex, and mass media. His autobiographical novel 'Empire Of The Sun' was filmed by Steven Spielberg.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

In the mid-1960s, J.G. Ballard intensified a process, already a preoccupation of his earlier work, by which his fiction underwent condensation, narrative compacting, and insurgence into visual arts forms. That process generated a series of image/text works, the Advertiser's Announcements, which he published on the back-covers of issues of Ambit magazine between 1967 and 1971, and formed exploratory test-zones towards his most exhaustive experiment in condensed fiction, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970). In Ballard's short fiction, that process also involved the appropriation of pre-existent medical reports, on such subjects as interventions on sexual organs, in which Ballard restricted himself to the insertion of the names of prominent actresses and public figures, or rearranged and accentuated elements of the sparse medical narratives. In many ways, that process of experimentation with fiction, as the systematic reduction of text to its core obsessions, was undertaken through the transformation of text into image, in which text is rendered so dense, and subjected to such pressure, that it mutates into image. Image, in turn, is exacerbated to the maximal degree, with all emotional aspects rigorously excised, with the result that the narrated image abruptly oscillates from pressurised reduction to maximal, excessive expansion, and its relationship with ocular scrutiny finally disintegrates or combusts, erasing all recognisable parameters. 'This magnification of image to the point where it becomes unrecognisable is a keynote of The Atrocity Exhibition', as William Burroughs wrote in his introduction to the book. An insane text, with the capacity to mutate into image, is the only form able to project Ballard's wasteland-cityscapes, abandoned cinemas, motorways and mental hospitals, all populated exclusively by the terminally insane. That unsustainable strain of condensation in Ballard's writing was released by 1973 with Crash, but by a final aberration, it returned to his work in the notebook form of his final fiction project, World Versus America, from around 2005, when the contemporary world has become a global insane asylum of arbitrary reversals and compulsions, and a European coalition of America's former allies must now unite to destroy it, using terrorist strategies, as the only means to annul its irrepressible neo-colonial manias. .......

Edition details

• Publisher: Sun Vision Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0985762519
• ISBN 13: 9780985762513
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 112