Search

It would not be an error to say that the films of Joseph Cornell are both renowned and little known. Historians of the avant-garde and students of film, especially those [...]

Although The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is often classified as science fiction, the most alluring quality of Mamoru Hosoda's 2006 feature animation is its representation of the rhythms of [...]

While time-travel adventures constitute a generic staple in Hollywood films produced within the past forty years, (1) timeslips seldom journey to the terrain of medieval historical fiction. With the blossoming [...]

Through a comparative analysis of the mise-en-scene of time travel in La Jetee and Twelve Monkeys, this article explores the differences between Hollywood cinema's reliance on full visibility and presence--a rhetoric of space and light--and the film's use of a wider sensorial spectrum that destabilizes the metaphysical equation of representation with vision while putting forth a rhetoric of time and darkness. Using Heidegger's critique of metaphysics and Foucault's theory of panopticism, the article argues that Twelve Monkeys reproduces the metaphorics of vision and power at work in the ontotheological tradition of Western representation. Twelve Monkeys' rationalizing discourse transforms the anxiety of being in time into a game of illusionist realism. Second, the film substitutes technological instrumentality for the inherently transporting capacities of the psyche. And third, while potentially dislocating, the film's time travel narrative ends up coercing temporality (and death) into a manageable, stable, and redeemable picture.

In 1963, an extraterrestrial burst from his time machine and onto British television screens to the strains of a deliciously eerie electronic theme tune, courtesy of the BBC's pioneering Radiophonic [...]

Mozart's life has greatly affected and influenced time travelling technocrats, their technology and scientific knowledge. Science fiction themes have often exhausted the idea of changing history. Works such as 'Mozart in Mirrorshades' illustrates an aspect of culture that ethnomusicologists have ignored. Aside from cultural imperialism, the work encouraged music scholars to begin focusing their attention on the impact of Anglo-European mass media and popular culture.

This essay considers the synchronous appearance of two similar narrative forms - time travel and the modernist geometrical narrative. In both traditional plot and character are reduced to games of logic and geometrical arabesque. And for both, the result is to transpose traditional story spacetime into the realm of temporal paradox. This comparison however leads to discovery of significant differences. If in both time travel and modernist narrative, time is subject to logical manipulation, the form and meaning of this act, in what are two quite distinct cultural contexts, is very different. What does it mean for the modernist to 'manipulate' time? What can this mean in terms of the empirical or 'physical' imperative of sf? These questions offer insight into the nature and extent of experimentation with spacetime categories in modern narrative. To answer them, we offer close readings of two contemporaneous works: Borges's 'Death and the Compass,' and Heinlein's 'By His Bootstraps.'

* In his introduction to Three Trips in Time and Space (1973), Robert Silverberg writes, 'If all things are possible, if all gates stand open, what sort of world will [...]