- Hardcover: 200 pages
- Publisher: Greenwood Press (30 Oct 1991)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0313279225
- ISBN-13: 978-0313279225
- Product Dimensions: 22.4 x 14.5 x 1.8 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,831,616 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Description
The author of "Empire of the Sun" and other acclaimed novels and stories, British science fiction writer J. G. Ballard is here given an analysis, his work being explored in terms of its internal coherence, its continuity and development, and its mythic and metaphysical aspects. Ballard's fiction is considered to be a critique of our secular, rational, technological culture, but this study departs from earlier ones that label him a fatalistic or nihilistic writer obsessed with entropy, devolution, and dissolution in showing him, instead, to be most deeply concerned with the redemption and regeneration of the human psyche. With Ballard's focus so much on visionary perception and mystical transcendence, Gregory Stephenson argues for his placement in the Romantic visionary tradition. A comprehensive examination of Ballard's work, this study traces his output and accomplishments over four decades, exploring their thematic development. Ballard is considered in relation to a number of British and American writers of the post-World War II era within and beyond the often too rigidly applied categorization of science fiction, as well as to poets and novelists of the past.
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following study of Ballard's work, I would like to trace in the author's short fiction and in his novels the development of the themes of transcendence and illusion, together with their concomitant themes, arguing that these themes represent neither an expression of universal pessimism nor a negation of human values and goals, but, rather, an affirmation of the highest humanistic and metaphysical ideal: the repossession for humankind of authentic and absolute being. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
following study of Ballard's work, I would like to trace in the author's short fiction and in his novels the development of the themes of transcendence and illusion, together with their concomitant themes, arguing that these themes represent neither an expression of universal pessimism nor a negation of human values and goals, but, rather, an affirmation of the highest humanistic and metaphysical ideal: the repossession for humankind of authentic and absolute being. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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10 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Ballard Needs More Than Banal Jungian Analysis
15 Feb 2001
Format:Hardcover
It is very popular to give analysis to an incredibly disparate number of subjects (literature, art, film, history, behavior, anthropology, etc.) through the murky lens of Jungian psychology. This is exactly what Stephenson is attempting to do with Ballard. Such an effort is vastly short-sighted. Stephenson wants to use all the currently stylish thinkers in pop psychology, the New Age movement, and Western inner-self dogma to give analysis to Ballard. He wants to use Joseph Campbell's methods, Jungian methods, Elliade's ideas, and he wants to use romantic and inaccurate ideas of the utopian nature of primitive cultures, and he also uses banal words like "transcendence," "fertility rituals," "infinite," "sublime," "psychic forces," "ego," and on and on. Clearly in books like Concrete Island and Crash, such silly commonplace analysis is just more of what we've all heard before a thousand times from every stylish, transient postmod thinker. In 50 years the next stylish thinker will come out and supplant Jung and Elliade. Then the hordes will compare that method to art, literature, film, and Ballard.
Ballard is a thinker that is beyond rigid systems of all the numerous 20th century thinkers that Stephenson wants to fit Ballard in to. Ballard needs to be looked at from the lens of the underworld, as Hillman might say, rather than from the tiring lens of the dayworld. Then perhaps we can get an analysis of Ballard that is more than just the cud of Freud, Jung, and Elliade.
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