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Archive for the ‘Alain Robbe-Grillet’ Category

‘Le passé composé de J. G. Ballard’: JGB on Empire of the Sun

By Dan OHara • Mar 11th, 2009 •

Category: Alain Robbe-Grillet, Ambit magazine, America, France, Japan, Michael Moorcock, New Worlds, Shanghai, WWII, William Burroughs, archival, autobiography, death of affect, drained swimming pools, film, inner space, memory, science fiction, sexual politics, surrealism, technology, television

Dan O’Hara back-translates an interview with JGB originally published in French in 1985. As the interviewers observe, Ballard was almost the subject of a French cult due to Crash. Asking why there are no car-crashes in Empire of the Sun, they reveal a very suggestive lacuna, with Ballard replying that even when one characteristic theme is absent from a work, the underlying emotion may remain the same, expressed by different means. Choice of metaphor is merely a matter of tone



Ballardoscope: some attempts at approaching the writer as a visionary

By Jordi Costa • Jul 26th, 2008 •

Category: Alain Robbe-Grillet, America, Bruce Sterling, Shanghai, Shepperton, Steven Spielberg, WWII, autobiography, deep time, drained swimming pools, features, flying, hyperreality, inner space, literature, medical procedure, science fiction, sexual politics, space relics, speed & violence, surrealism, technology, war

Jordi Costa, the curator of J.G. Ballard: Autopsy of the New Millennium, currently exhibiting at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, gifts us this incisive analysis of the major themes in Ballard’s work. Accompanying the essay is the alternate version of the exhibition’s promo trailer.