Ballard manuscripts (enlarging the research scope)

• Grant number: 12/20491-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Post-doctor
• Start date: June 28, 2013
• End date: August 27, 2013
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Literature Theory
• Principal Investigator: Suzi Frankl Sperber
• Grantee: Alcebiades Diniz Miguel
• Supervisor: Philip Tew
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Brunel University, England
• Associated to the scholarship: 11/09985-4 - About the disseminated evil (evil landscapes and margins in the J. G. Ballard fictional narrative stream), BP.PD

Abstract

One of the most problematizing key elements in the speculative and fantastic fiction - in a perspective that sets a specifically mark in the history, a literature form that starts at the end of the eighteenth century -, recognized for his many analysts, is the tension between the standard, the everyday life and its randomness conventional and the disturbing shift that moves through the cracks of normal and subverts the peacemaking facts flowing. This tension between the norm and deviation, also noticeable in the realistic literary forms, generates a factor of subversion and disruption of the universe that could be called evil, which thus possess certain contradiction in defining their very essence: asks for an incarnation along the concrete universe - a figure defined, socially and historically recognizable or the conjunction of a special moment in time with a designated location in space - while requiring theoretical definitions that may make it understandable. This dual nature was the theoretical explorations engine that not disdained neither rhetoric nor the creation narrative powers, for demonstrating the dire consequences of being, voluntarily or not, in the enemy ranks when creating large panels of contrasting kindness and wickedness. Thus we have, in the fiction of James Graham Ballard, a search twofold: forcing the explanatory scope of the traditions of Evil and reinvent them in the light of History, which arises in the distorting mirror of fiction as a reproduction/suggestion of the fearful. (AU)