Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.15291/sic/2.13.lc.6
Urban Landscape as the Embodiment of Social and Psychological Entropy in J. G. Ballard’s Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannnes
Milena Škobo
; Sinergija University, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Jovana Đukić
; Sinergija University, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Abstract
The fiction of J. G. Ballard closely examines contemporary environmental and climate change issues through the author’s consistent juxtaposition of natural and urban settings, which are often associated with individuals on both a personal and global level. While his early works – cli-fi novels – primarily focus on global-scale physical catastrophes caused by human activities, his later works – urban disaster and urban violence novels – portray the urban catastrophe that threatens to invade man’s personal sphere. This inquiry attempts to demonstrate that the inhabitants of the enclosed societies portrayed in Ballard’s urban violence novels, namely Cocaine Nights (1996) and Super-Cannes (2000), are inexorably drifting toward a state of social and psychological entropy. These communities strive to condition their cognitive framework to align with the sterile and impersonal urban environment, thereby eliciting us to envisage incessant reciprocity with the milieu. By introducing the concept of ‘trans-corporeality’ to connote the fundamental nature of the symbiotic relationship between humans and the ‘more-than-human’ world, and the consequent blurring of boundaries between body and environment, this paper aims to illuminate the critical significance of environmental health and the notion that the human body (or psyche) is inextricably intertwined with its surroundings.
Keywords
fourth wave ecocriticism, trans-corporeality, urban landscape, environmental health, urban violence
Hrčak ID:
311141
URI
Publication date:
19.6.2023.
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