Arguably the greatest single work in the history of psychology. James's analyses of habit, the nature of emotion, the phenomenology of attention, the stream of thought, the perception of space, and the multiplicity of the consciousness of self are still widely cited and incorporated into contemporary theoretical accounts of these phenomena.

The Principles of Psychology

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Narrative and the Reconfiguration of the Humanist Subject in Robbe-Grillet, Ballard, and Ligotti

How can memory be understood if not through metaphor? It seems that every attempt at definition has necessitated this shift towards the figurative; each age calling forth a new language for tracing the contours of remembering, with these new-minted metaphors sometimes struggling to keep up with humanity’s desire to plumb the depths of its own past. The aim of this chapter is to examine the evolution of this language, to explore how metaphors have shaped our understanding of the mind. From the earliest characterizations of memory as a wax tablet or a storehouse to the modern mind-as-computer, metaphors have been used to offer models designed to illuminate a process so central to our understanding of what it is to be human that one might be tempted to call our species homo recordans.

Metaphors of memory: from the classical world to modernity

Having made his home in Shepperton for the last forty years, JG Ballard has lived much of his creative life in the literal shadow of cinema: perhaps then it is unsurprising that his writing has exhibited such a pervasive fascination with film, as both the embodiment of popular culture in the last century, and as a form that offers new approaches to the experience of the world. This article explores three works by Ballard, 'The Atrocity Exhibition', 'Crash', and 'Empire of the Sun' through their cinematic adaptations, and seeks to demonstrate how Ballard’s work generates a complex series of interactions between literary and cinematic texts, effectively problematising the usually unidirectional relationship between source text and cinematic adaptation. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s work on the Cinematic Image and Francis Bacon (and considering Bacon’s own fascination with the proto-cinema of Muybridge and Marey) the work will be explored through a Deleuzian model that allows for the reflection and refraction of image and narrative. It will be argued that Ballard’s works effectively anticipate their cinematic revisioning, suggesting that the supposed ‘unfilmability’ of ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ and ‘Crash’ lay less in any moral squeamishness, and more in the fact that they are novels that were effectively filmed in the very moment of their writing.

Corin Depper

Papers

Metaphors of memory: from the classical world to modernity

Death at work: the cinematic imagination of J.G. Ballard