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J. G. Ballard and the Sciences
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J. G. Ballard and the Sciences

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 January 2020) | Viewed by 11671

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Thomas Knowles

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
School of English, Birmingham City University University, Birmingham B4 7XG, UK
Interests: science fiction; romantic legacies; ecocriticism; the gothic; twentieth-century fiction; contemporary fiction

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

“Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.” ---- J.G. Ballard

From The Drowned World’s early meditations on ecology, to the provocative prosthetics of Crash, through to the psychopathologies at work (or rather play) in Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes and Kingdom Come, the writings of J.G. Ballard are in constant dialogue with the discourses of science and technology. As a result, his novels and short stories function as vast indexes of scientific innovation and enquiry, immersing the reader in the complex yet often beautiful languages of biology, chemistry, zoology, medicine, botany, neuroscience, bioethics, anatomy, biotechnology and psychology, to name just a few.

Proposals are invited for articles on all aspects of the intersections between J.G. Ballard and science. Proposals are welcomed from researchers at all stages of their career, including postgraduate students, independent scholars and creative writers.

Please send 500-word abstracts to Thomas Knowles [email protected] by the end of May 2018. A short biography should also be included.

Dr. Thomas Knowles
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • academic
  • ballard
  • call for papers
  • csff
  • j.g. ballard
  • science fiction
  • speculative fiction

Published Papers (3 papers)

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15 pages, 261 KiB  
Article
‘A Marriage of Freud and Euclid’: Psychotic Epistemology in The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash
by Samuel Francis
Humanities 2019, 8(2), 93; https://doi.org/10.3390/h8020093 - 14 May 2019
Viewed by 2989
Abstract
The writings of J.G. Ballard respond to the sciences in multiple ways; as such his (early) writing may productively be discussed as science fiction. However, the theoretical discipline to which he publicly signalled most allegiance, psychoanalysis, is one whose status in relation to [...] Read more.
The writings of J.G. Ballard respond to the sciences in multiple ways; as such his (early) writing may productively be discussed as science fiction. However, the theoretical discipline to which he publicly signalled most allegiance, psychoanalysis, is one whose status in relation to science is highly contested and complex. In the 1960s Ballard signalled publicly in his non-fiction writing a belief in psychoanalysis as a science, a position in keeping with psychoanalysis’ contemporary status as the predominant psychological paradigm. Various early Ballard stories enact psychoanalytic theories, while the novel usually read as his serious debut, The Drowned World, aligns itself allusively with an oft-cited depiction by Freud of the revelatory and paradigm-changing nature of the psychoanalytic project. Ballard’s enthusiastic embrace of psychoanalysis in his early 1960s fiction mutated into a fascinatingly delirious vision in some of his most experimental work of the late 1960s and early 1970s of a fusion of psychoanalysis with the mathematical sciences. This paper explores how this ‘Marriage of Freud and Euclid’ is played out in its most systematic form in The Atrocity Exhibition and its successor Crash. By his late career Ballard was acknowledging problems raised over psychoanalysis’ scientific status in the positivist critique of Karl Popper and the work of various combatants in the ‘Freud Wars’ of the 1990s; Ballard at this stage seemed to move towards agreement with interpretations of Freud as a literary or philosophical figure. However, despite making pronouncements reflecting changes in dominant cultural appraisals of Freud, Ballard continued in his later writings to extrapolate the fictive and interpretative possibilities of Freudian and post-Freudian ideas. This article attempts to develop a deeper understanding of Ballard’s ‘scientific’ deployment of psychoanalysis in The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash within the context of a more fully culturally-situated understanding of psychoanalysis’ relationship to science, and thereby to create new possibilities for understanding the meanings of Ballard’s writing within culture at large. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue J. G. Ballard and the Sciences)
16 pages, 243 KiB  
Article
Environmental Catastrophe as Morphogenesis: Inhuman Transformations in Ballard’s Climate Novels
by Moritz Ingwersen
Humanities 2019, 8(1), 52; https://doi.org/10.3390/h8010052 - 09 Mar 2019
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 4485
Abstract
This paper offers a discussion of J. G. Ballard’s first four novels, The Wind From Nowhere (1962), The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1965), and The Crystal World (1966) that centers on their portrayal of environmental transformation. Drawing on revised conceptualizations of the [...] Read more.
This paper offers a discussion of J. G. Ballard’s first four novels, The Wind From Nowhere (1962), The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1965), and The Crystal World (1966) that centers on their portrayal of environmental transformation. Drawing on revised conceptualizations of the second law of thermodynamics and recent materialist scholarship, I illustrate how Ballard invokes material transformations that are ambivalently coded as terminal stasis and morphogenesis. In anticipations of the paradigm of the Anthropocene and ecocritical approaches to global climate change, Ballard’s novels re-embed the human in an ecology of inhuman forces and modes of self-organization that radically challenge entrenched ontological divisions and systemic boundaries. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which emergent structures, such as hurricanes and crystals identify his landscapes as dissipative systems far from equilibrium and rife with potential for the spontaneous generation of form. This resonance with scientific frameworks reveals itself in poetic registers that parallelize metaphors of life and death, and hinge on an estrangement of not only landscape, but also temporality, thus literalizing what it might mean to understand the human as a geological subject in the age of the Anthropocene. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue J. G. Ballard and the Sciences)
12 pages, 201 KiB  
Article
Very Strange Sit-Coms: J. G. Ballard, Psychopathology, and Online Participatory Media
by Martin Gleghorn
Humanities 2019, 8(1), 50; https://doi.org/10.3390/h8010050 - 07 Mar 2019
Viewed by 3154
Abstract
“We’re all going to be starring in our own sit-coms, and they’ll be very strange sit-coms too, like the inside of our heads.”—J. G. Ballard, Extreme Metaphors. Ballard’s prediction about the possibility of projecting the inside of our own heads is highly illuminating [...] Read more.
“We’re all going to be starring in our own sit-coms, and they’ll be very strange sit-coms too, like the inside of our heads.”—J. G. Ballard, Extreme Metaphors. Ballard’s prediction about the possibility of projecting the inside of our own heads is highly illuminating in light of contemporary discourses on participatory media culture and online video-sharing platforms. This is not least due to the documented instances of violence and sexual deviance surrounding prominent figures on YouTube that lend a considerable amount of credence to what Ballard described, in his 1977 short story ‘The Intensive Care Unit’, as a ‘liberating affectlessness [that] allowed those who wished to explore the fullest range of sexual possibility and paved the way for the day when a truly guilt-free sexual perversity and, even, psychopathology might be enjoyed by all.’ This article examines how Ballard’s preoccupation with this ‘liberating affectlessness’—or as he notably termed it in his introduction to Crash, ‘the death of affect’—compares to the impetus that psychologists such as Jonathan Rottenberg and Sheri L. Johnson place upon an ‘affective science’ approach to exploring and treating psychopathology—an approach that they affirm has ‘tremendous potential to facilitate scientific work on the role of emotions in psychopathology.’ This active interplay between emotion and affect (or the calculated lack of) on one hand, and psychopathology on the other that Ballard and Rottenberg and Johnson investigate from different angles also feeds into discourses on online participatory media and the ways that users engage with online media. Specifically, this section of the article will draw upon the roles of private and public spaces, and the breakdown of traditional barriers between them, as well as the commercial factors that define and underpin this new media culture. ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ and later novels such as Cocaine Nights (1996) play upon these themes as a means of anticipating and demonstrating how, in Ballard’s fiction as well as in real-life instances, psychopathology emerges in the breakdown of the barriers between lives lived excessively on screen and the external, sensory and emotional world. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue J. G. Ballard and the Sciences)
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