| dc.description | The thesis explores ethical dilemmas that follow in the wake of J. G. Ballard's early 1970s novels: The Atrocity Exhibition , Crash, Concrete Island and High-Rise---a quartet which the thesis treats as a microcosm of the thematic preoccupations that, with variations, recur throughout Ballard's body of work. The argument I put forward is that forms of elemental corporeality appear in the quartet as an antidote to the technologically facilitated a-consequential thinking of Ballard's characters. Responding to poststructuralist criticism, the thesis acknowledges the fragility of the referential link between Ballard's fiction and an idea of corporeality anterior to cultural inscription and technological interaction, but insists on the importance of maintaining that link. Complicating the 'semiotic' body theorised by several of Ballard's poststructuralist critics, the thesis focusses on a form of corporeality which, if it signifies anything, signifies vulnerability, weakness or human limitation. Hence, while the quartet remains a seminal moment in the cultural construction of 'cyborgs,' the early version of this biotechnological figure found in the quartet has lasting significance because Ballard does not gloss over the possibility that its realisation in practical terms may beget victimisation or exploitation. Because the thesis is premised on the notion that ethical sensibility is enriched as one works through literary textures within narratives, its individual chapters feature careful considerations of episodic nuance. Together, these close readings show how explanations of Ballard's representation of psychopathological behaviour in terms of a figurative expansion of the category of 'the human,' and a rejection of the exclusionary violence implied in that normative category, must also account for psychotic limits---points where embracing the radical otherness of the psychopathic risks becoming merely irresponsible relative to the actuality of the characters' behaviour. Acknowledging these limits does not cancel the ethical value of a reading practice which normalises Ballard's psychopathic characters, but it does suggest that such deconstructions of categorical boundaries should not be undertaken lightly. | en_US |
