Bridging modernist studies and science fiction scholarship
Modernism and Time Machines places the fascination with time in canonical works of twentieth-century literature and art side-by-side with the rise of time-travel narratives and alternate histories in popular culture. Both modernism and this cardinal trope of science fiction produce a range of effects and insights that go beyond the exhilarations of simply sliding back and forth in history. Together the modernist time-obsession and the fantasy of moving in time help us to rethink the shapes of time, the consistency of timespace and the nature of history.
Key Features
Draws on insights from a range of sources, including critical geography, postcolonial theory, science and technology studies, and time studiesExamines different kinds of objects together: SF, Impressionism, and Henri Lefebvres rhythmanalysis; evolutionary biology, Eliots The Waste Land, and Leinsters "Sidewise in Time"; Woolf, Philip K. Dicks alternate history, and the film Interstellar; bullet time, Faulkners racialized lag, and Jessica Hagedorns postcolonial anachronism; "big history," Olaf Stapledons two-billion-year novel of the human species, and Terrence Malicks film Tree of Life
