This article explores the way in which surrealist techniques and assumptions underpin spatial representations in Ballard’s "Concrete Island". With much of Ballard’s fiction using spatiality as an ...ideologically charged instrument to articulate a critique that underpins postcapitalist culture, it seems important to focus on exactly the kind of spaces that he creates. This paper will investigate the means by which spatiality is conceptualized in Ballard’s fiction, with special emphasis on places situated on the borders between realism and fantasy. Ballard’s spaces, often positioned on the edgelands of cities or centers of civilization, can be aligned with the surrealist project as presented not only by the Situationalist International, but of psychogeographical discourse in general. What the various Ballardian spaces—motorways, airports, high-rises, deserts, shopping malls, suburbs—have in common is a sense of existing outside stable definitions or what, following Marc Augé, we would call non-places, which by their definition are disconnected from a globalized image society, thus generating a revolutionary idea of freedom. As these places exist outside the cognitive map we impose on our environment, they present a potentially liberating force that resonates in Ballard’s fiction.
This article discusses the German-Polish author Steffen Möller and his self-presentation as a "betweener" in the works Viva Polonia (2008), Expedition to the Poles (2012), and Viva Warszawa (2015). ...The article construes it as a central concept of Möller's narratives about Poland by connecting it with Greg Madison's phenomenon of "existential migration." The analysis of the motif of train travel in Möller's oeuvre points out the author's rendering of Marc Augé's "non-places" as spatial zones of transition and heterotopias, which accommodate shifting senses of time and place, allow for the subverting of established social hierarchies and narrative structures, and are characterized by their own idiom and avoidance of linearity.
The fictionaliztion of the contemporary experience of reality as seen in the works of Marc Auge is examined. By presenting fictions that draw so heavily on preexisting typologies, even caricatures ...(the tourist, the commuter, the lonely internet surfer etc.), Auge unwittingly reproduces the key characteristic of contemporary culture as he defines it - the recycling of received images rather than the creation of new ones-- becoming the anthropologist of supermodernity in a sense that he would hardly wish.
Estratto
Attraverso una disamina dell’introduzione a Nonluoghi di Marc Augé, scritta dall’autore per il suo lavoro sull’antropologia della contemporaneità, questo studio esplora le modalità secondo ...cui si creano, nei suoi testi, ‘effetti di letterarietà’ pregnanti sia per le strategie narrative utilizzate, sia per i risvolti teorici in antropologia. La tesi che viene sostenuta è che, già nelle prefazioni dei testi di Augé, l’invenzione di ‘storie dei tempi moderni’ diventa un mezzo per riflettere criticamente su alcuni fenomeni tipici della nostra epoca, quali le nuove formazioni spaziali, il senso della memoria e della storia, le conseguenze delle nuove tecnologie e le relative forme di ritualità. Teoria della cultura e strategie narrative costruiscono insieme, nel caso di Augé, un tipo di testo che ostenta effetti letterari il cui valore dipende da intenti memorialistici, autoriflessivi ed estetici che si mischiano e si sovrappongono per consentirgli di avanzare una critica della surmodernità. L’analisi del prologue a Nonluoghi permette di riflettere sull’antropologia in quanto testo e di rivelare le dinamiche attraverso cui un autore costruisce, implicitamente o esplicitamente, lo stesso impianto teorico, le strategie narrative e i principi letterari cui affida il senso del suo lavoro.
In the Metro Motte, Warren
World Literature Today,
10/2003, Letnik:
77, Številka:
3/4
Book Review
Recenzirano
Marc Aug. In the Metro. Tom Conley, tr. & intro. Minneapolis. University of Minnesota Press. 2002. xxii + 125 pages, ill. $52.95 ($18.05 paper). ISBN 0-8166-3436-X (3437-8 paper)
"La Cause des prophetes: Politique et religion en Afrique contemporain, suivi de "La Lecon des prophetes" par Marc Auge" by Jean-Pierre Dozon is reviewed.
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