Abstract
The fiction of J.G. Ballard represents architectural forms, the urban dimension, and the human relations evolving around them as a means of examining and better understanding the transformations of capitalism over the last five decades. This chapter examines Ballard’s novel Super-Cannes and its engagement with the city as a space where ideology, social transformations, history, and economic trends converge. In particular, the chapter examines the novel’s focus on gated communities as physical manifestations of the ideology of global capitalism and on the dystopic nature of gating, through the analysis of the violence perpetrated by community residents against outsiders. This violence functions as a metonym of the systemic violence of global capitalism and its new spatial order conceived as a space of exception.
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Di Bernardo, F. (2018). Gated Communities and Dystopia in J.G. Ballard’s Super-Cannes. In: Michael, M. (eds) Twenty-First-Century British Fiction and the City. Literary Urban Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89728-8_5
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