Baker, Brian (2016) The European Circuit:Report on Probability A and Barefoot in the Head. Foundation. pp. 21-34. ISSN 0306-4964
B_Baker_The_European_Circuit_final_draft.pdf - Accepted Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs.
Download (288kB)
Abstract
‘The European Circuit’ considers the influence of European modernism on the New Wave of science fiction, in particular Brian Aldiss’s Report on Probability A and Barefoot in the Head (both 1969), and it takes as its focus the car journey and the car crash, recurrent motifs in Barefoot in the Head, Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) – a collection of ‘condensed novels’ – and Crash (1973). It will draw upon Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto as well as following Ballard’s use of Jarry’s ‘The Passion considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race’ in the Atrocity Exhibition story ‘The Assassination of President Kennedy as a Downhill Motor Race’ in mashing up the bicycle/ motor race, sacrifice, the apocalyptic/ catastrophe, and the transcendent. This chapter completes the ‘circuit’ of the assassination narrative, placing it in European literary and cultural contexts.