1. Jonathan P. Eburne: Surrealism and the Art of Crime. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2008. Eine Dissertation, die bei Jean-Michel Rabaté angefertigt wurde. Aus dem Diss. Abstract: “‘Surrealism and the Art of Crime’ examines the role of crime and crime discourse in the conceptual universe of the Surrealist movement. [...] For the Surrealists, the local impact of contemporary crimes and their representation in the media afforded a means for addressing the problems and limits of the immediate cultural order. At the same time, the more broadly historical forms of detective mysteries, gothic novels, and the ‘criminal’ fictions of Poe, Sade, and Lautréamont are instrumental to the Surrealists’ sense of historicity. The allusions to crime and crime literature in Surrealist art and writing form a condensed and dismembered body of knowledge that addresses the modalities of experience in the modern world. In turn, this surrealist intervention can throw new light on the more ‘populist’ forms of Surrealism that have arisen in the aftermath of the Second World War, from the critical concept of film noir, to the violent comic universe of a hard-boiled American writer like Chester Himes”. (Verlagsanzeige; außerdem gibt’s eine Rezension bei Harper’s Magazine.)
2. Jeannette Baxter: The Surrealist Fait Divers: Uncovering Violent Histories in J. G. Ballard’s Running Wild. Online als PDF (aus Papers of Surrealism Issue 5 Spring 2007).
Abstract: In this paper I read J.G. Ballard’s illustrated novella, Running Wild (1984), as a subversive example of the surrealist fait divers. One of the most ethically challenging fragments in Ballard’s often controversial oeuvre, this modified detective fiction presents the reader with a catalogue of contemporary atrocities – parricide, political assassination and terrorism, acts of random violence – and challenges us, the readers, to get our hands dirty. I explore how Ballard negotiates the cultural and historical consequences of global capitalism in Running Wild, and how he tests, through fiction, the controversial theory that moral and social transgressions are legitimate correctives to psychological and social inertia. In this context, Ballard incorporates a variety of surrealist texts (paintings, photographs, collages) into his fait divers, I suggest, in order to open up moments of critical and ethical reflection, and to provoke the reader into a confrontation with the deviant logics and violent psychopathologies which operate below the polite surface of contemporary history and culture”.
Ashgate kündigt ein Buch der Autorin über Ballard an, das allem Anschein nach noch nicht ausgeliefert ist: J.G. Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination: Spectacular Authorship. … Ein Interview mit Baxter über Ballard gibt’s im Ballardian.
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