vendredi 21 mars 2014

THE RATTENKRIEG -VIKTOR TABORI - OR BLACK ADDER GOES FORTH - FIRST WORLD WAR -RAT FRICASSÉ - POMOS A MARINAR NUMA POÇA...QUANTO TEMPO? ATÉ FICAR AFOGADO- E RAT BOULONNAISE IS THE SAME? NO THE RAT IS BIGGER - RAT AU VIN, SIR? IS A RAT RUN BY A VAN , C'EST CAUSALITY IN CASUALITY - IT'S CHAOS OR KAOS IN LIFE OR IN RAT'S -THE RATTENKRIEG


Ballard explores the interior landscape of isolated humans in a postmodern world transformed by science and technology.

He is recognized for his surrealistic science fiction, including detailed descriptions of geographical catastrophes and apocalyptic landscapes as well as his depictions of the transforming effects of science and technology upon human beings. His primary emphasis has been on inner space and the psychological processes of his characters. His distinctive science fiction has not only won him a loyal following but has influenced and helped shape the development of the genre. The Disaster Area (1967) contains Ballard's well-known story,
“The Subliminal Man,” in which alienated citizens of a futuristic metropolis, psychologically enslaved to a system of subliminal advertising, may escape only through catatonia and regression. The title story from the collection The Overloaded Man (1967) illustrates the moral dangers of solipsism in its narrative about a bourgeois intellectual who destroys the earth by fantasizing the landscape outside his window into meaningless cubist designs. In The Voices of Time and Other Stories (1962), Ballard establishes his major, recurring theme of entropy. His theory, derived from the second law of thermodynamics, implies the temporal nature of the universe in its assertion that all matter must eventually degrade from order and energy to a state of chaos and inertia. In the title story of The Terminal Beach and Other Stories (1964), an obsessed ex-bomber pilot wanders an abandoned nuclear testing site in search of a “zone of non-time” where he may speak with the dead of past and future wars and where ontological beliefs are negated by the ultimate reality of the bomb. The Impossible Man and Other Stories (1966), contains “The Drowned Giant,” in which a giant's body is inexplicably washed ashore near a city. The story recalls both Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis in its epigrammatic narrative, which describes the citizenry's initial fear, gradual acceptance, and ultimate denial of the fact of the giant's existence once it has been removed. In The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), Ballard describes society's modern immunity to sensational subject matter as “the death of affect,” and in such stories as “Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy” and “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan,” Ballard examines America's perverse attraction toward and hatred for public and political figures. This work is concerned with the dehumanizing, violent, perversely erotic elements that Ballard sees as intrinsic to the technologies of the late twentieth century. One of the stories from this collection led to the novel Crash (1973). Following its appearance in England, The Atrocity Exhibition attracted controversy due to its presumed pornographic treatment of public figures and immoral subject matter. Despite the support of several prominent critics, the work did not appear in the United States for nearly two years, and The Atrocity Exhibition is noted as one of Ballard's most disputatious works to date. Low-Flying Aircraft and Other Stories (1976), contains Ballard's acclaimed novella, The Ultimate City, which features a protagonist who rejects the inefficiency of his simple agrarian society and leads his community in restoring technology to a late-twentieth century ghost town. As the city's population grows, however, so do such accompanying problems as pollution, crime, and violence. War Fever (1990), Ballard's most recent volume of new stories, is stylistically diverse. Much of Ballard's short fiction examines the landscapes of technology and the communications industry—illuminating the many paradoxes and underlying debasements of modern life.