Our media- and platform-neutral production processes meet the highest standards. Enthusiasm for science is our motivation. Narr Francke Attempto is one of the leading scientific publishers in the fields of German studies, Romance studies, English studies, foreign language didactics, theology and cultural studies. However, whereas in the postmodern 'heterotopia' the imaginary comes to the fore as a gratifying potential of human nature, in Ballard's dystopian urban disaster novels it is challengingly visualized as a fundamentally destructive and evil force in man. In Crash this story of liberation culminates in an unfettered exploration of the deepest reaches of the human mind and the imaginative powers with which whatever inhabits these reaches is externalized in concrete form. It will be seen that the transition from the modern to the postmodern can be conceived in terms of a gradual liberation of the imaginary in the writing process.
In order to account for the astonishingly high degree of narrative continuity prevalent in much contemporary dystopian fiction, Wolfgang Iser's concept of the imaginary will first be discussed with special regard to the effects of the postmodernist turn in literature and then applied to James G. The following essay sets out to look at the postmodern elements in dystopian fiction from a different point of view, taking into consideration the fact that the dystopian novel is first and foremost concerned with the depiction of a wretched and nightmarish future world. Recent approaches in literary studies argue that the postmodernist utopian/dystopian novel differs from the classical utopian/dystopian novel in its semiotic interplay of discursive practices that decenters the narrational continuity and dehierarchizes the symbolical order established in the text.
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