Modernism and Time Machines

By (author) Charles M. Tung

Bridging modernist studies and science fiction scholarshipModernism 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 FeaturesDraws 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 Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis; evolutionary biology, Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Leinster’s “Sidewise in Time”; Woolf, Philip K. Dick’s alternate history, and the film Interstellar; bullet time, Faulkner’s racialized lag, and Jessica Hagedorn’s postcolonial anachronism; “big history,” Olaf Stapledon’s two-billion-year novel of the human species, and Terrence Malick’s film Tree of Life