Du, Chan;
(2025)
J. G. Ballard's (Sub)Urban Landscapes.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
This thesis on J. G. Ballard’s (sub)urban places is situated in literary geography and has a double fucus on literature and geography. Comparing Ballard’s backward-looking posture to that of Walter Benjamin, I situate his work in the twilight zone after photography’s theoretical mode has, as Rosalind Krauss argues, brought about the wholesale transformation of modern art. I read his hero as an artist-worker-bricoleur, reappropriating forms, reinventing places, and recreating mythologies, in a post-utopia, post-industrial, post-medium landscape. I argue that Ballard’s in-betweenness, as problematized in Ballard criticism, urges us to rethink a set of historical categories and paradigms. Using an invented medium that interacts with a wide range of world-building and myth-making cultural forms, his collection of work, on the one hand, maps out a circular topology, ‘bivalent’ structure, twinned impulses, and a unified suburban posture in major art, political vanguardism of the twentieth century. On the other hand, his work illuminates the forms, topologies, rhythms in a series of (sub)urban places and communities organized around infrastructures. These places, drawing on the constructivist methods and visual techniques of modern art, rely on apocalyptic moments of disrupted mobility. As bounded networks, they are embedded within structures with heightened forms of ordering. Dramatizing the constructed nature of the built environment and unveiling the poetic dimension in urban infrastructures, his work debunks the myth of the non-place/heterotopia that continues to draw on avant-garde rhetorics and opens culture to alternative ways of ordering. Reconceptualizing forms in a time when modernism/formalism/avant-gardism is both dead and alive, this thesis proposes to rethink the relation between art and reality, history and poetics.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | J. G. Ballard's (Sub)Urban Landscapes |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2022. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Anthropology |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10204830 |
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