J. G. Ballard's novel, The Atrocity Exhibition, opens in a gymnasium in a mental hospital, where the art work of the "long incarcerated patients" had been put on public display. The staff psychiatrists found the exhibition "disquieting" because of the works' "marked preoccupation with. world cataclysm," and "the bizarre images with their fusion of Eniwetok and Luna Park, Freud and Elizabeth Taylor." To Dr. Catherine Austin, the works "hung on the enameled walls like codes of insoluble dreams, the keys to a nightmare," and Dr. Nathan saw the works as signs of a "War in Hell". The artists themselves were not available for comment as they had not been invited to the event. The site of the exhibition and the rules of both the selection of the art works and exclusion of the artists model the discursive relation of psychosis to psychoanalysis from Freud to Lacan. I will explore the implications of that model, and extrapolate Ballard's adaptation of that psychopathology as a template for the relation of consciousness both to the celebrity-haunted mediascape and the unresolved traumas of the twentieth century.

Earl Jackson is Associate Professor Emeritus from the University of California, Santa Cruz and Professor Emeritus from National Chiao Tung University. He is the contributing co-editor (with David Desser) of The Cinema of Kinoshita Keisuke. Films of Joy and Sorrow, and the author of Strategies of Deviance. Studies in Gay Male Representation; and the forthcoming Critical Conditions: Theory and Practice in Japanese Cinema. He has published essays on Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, Vietnamese, and Hungarian cinema, and is currently completing a monograph on Japanese genre film and collaborating on a book project on sex and anxiety in the cinema.

Co-sponsored by the Department of English, the Department of Comparative Literature and Languages, and the CHASS Dean's Office and the Center for Ideas and Society.