Ballard, J. G. | Roger Luckhurst (essay date 1997)
Roger Luckhurst (essay date 1997)
SOURCE: Luckhurst, Roger. “The Atrocity Exhibition and the Problematic of the Avant-Garde.” In ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard, pp. 73-117. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997.
[In the following essay, Luckhurst discusses both the modernist and postmodernist characteristics of Ballard's work.]
How is one to approach this object, this text or texts? The fifteen sections that make up The Atrocity Exhibition1 appeared singly, across a wide range of journals, both science fiction and non-science fiction; are these short stories, then, separable as such? James Blish sensed a design: ‘pieces of a mosaic, the central subject of which is not yet visible … these fragments … are going somewhere, by the most unusual method of trying to surround it, or work into it from the edges of a frame’ (127). The assumption here is that the sequence...
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