About the disseminated evil (evil landscapes and margins in the J. G. Ballard fictional narrative stream)

• Grant number: 11/09985-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: October 01, 2011
• End date: December 31, 2013
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Literature Theory
• Principal Investigator: Suzi Frankl Sperber
• Grantee: Alcebiades Diniz Miguel
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 12/20491-6 - Ballard manuscripts (enlarging the research scope), BE.EP.PD

Abstract

One particularly fantasy narratives problematic element - a question understood as a diachronic defined phenomenon, which begins at the end eighteenth century -, known for many analysts, is the tension between the standard, everyday life and its conventional structure in a contrast with the disturbing shift that moves through the cracks of normal, subverting the regular and peaceful facts. This tension between the standard and the deviation, a noticeable feature of the literature realistic and that was inherited by the contemporary fantastic narrative genres as science fiction, the thriller fiction, the literature of terror; this kind of tension generate a factor of destabilization and disruption of the universe we might call Evil which thus possess certain contradiction defining in its very essence: asks for a incarnation not so far of the concrete universe and at the same time there is a demand for theoretical definitions that could make this evil understandable. This double nature has been the engine of theoretical explorations not disdained the powers neither rhetoric nor the creation narrative to the demonstration of terrible consequences of being voluntarily or not, in the ranks of evil forces. But these contrasting panels lost their force as the Evil was reduced, initially, to a dissonance in a harmonious whole or broadened to encompass the essence of the universe, with slight interruptions. We have, in the fiction of J. G. Ballard, a dual quest: at the same time forcing the explanatory scope of the traditions of Evil and reinvent them, the light of History, which appears in distorting mirror of fiction, where there a reproductive / projective hints of fear. (AU)