ANOTHER PLACE, ANOTHER TIME

This brief initial talk will introduce you to the overarching theme of this lecture series, and begins to sketch some of the ambiguities that we will encounter and debate throughout the semester. This is the only episode not recorded as an interview.

Authenticity is one of the topics at the heart of this lecture series -- and notoriously hard to grasp. In this episode, David Eisler gives a brief introduction to his research on American war fiction, which leads us into a discussion about the concept of authority and authenticity across different genres and literary contexts. Do we expect the same degree of authenticity from an adventure novel as we do from literary fiction? Is the author's lived experience significant to a text's perceived authenticity? And how important is all of that, anyway? As we circle around the question of authenticity, we touch upon topics like paratext, assigned and internal authenticity, subjectivity of experience, empathy, inequality in access to publishing, and recent literary scandals.

Edgar Allan Poe's fiction has a penchant for remote settings, or settings which cannot be geographically located at all. This remoteness from the reader's everyday life frequently comes with narrators whose psychological state is likewise removed from that of the reader, and whose highly subjective, intense narrative style can have an absorbing and transposing effect. Prof. Dr. Dieter Schulz introduces some of Poe's central short stories and contextualises them within the Gothic tradition, and we discuss trajectories within Gothic fiction as well as Poe's relation to American transcendentalism, and the meaning of art itself.

If l'art pour l'art marks one side of a spectrum, literature of reform sits on the opposite end, as art with an explicit purpose to educate, to better, and to effect change in the world. One of the literary techniques used to criticise and potentially change perceived social injustices especially in the nineteenth century was sentimentalism: evoking a certain feeling, usually of sympathy, perhaps even pity, in the readership. PD Dr Margit Peterfy gives an introduction to the principles of sentimentalism, particularly its historical background, and highlights a number of important literary examples and their associated social causes. We discuss the development of the literary forms associated with this concept, and the changing effects after the turn of the century.

Urban fantasy can be located in two different literary genres and traditions: that of fantasy, and that of city literature. Through its combination of familiar city life and the fantastic, urban fantasy literature can make us question the world we live in, and our own everyday surroundings. Dr Christian Schneider introduces a number of different approaches to fantasy, and we discuss various examples, including works by Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, and China Miéville, and their critical potential.

In a departure from his previous subject matter, Herman Melville chose a historical setting for his 1855 story Israel Potter, which begins during the American Revolution. Along with a brief introduction to the novel, Sebastian Tants-Boestad provides insight into some possible readings, and we discuss Melville's implicit criticism of the consequences of the Revolution, as well as potential alternatives to common historical narratives.

While William Blake is well-known today, at least by name, his works are highly enigmatic, fragmented, and unfinalised. This, as will be argued in this episode, is essential to the notion of unattainable truth. To help us navigate at least some of Blake's ideas, Armen Hesse gives an introduction to Blake's mythology and the struggle between poetic genius and reason. We discuss the continuous and at times paradoxical way in which Blake tried to negotiate these concepts, and how other writers, artists, and scholars have tried to find truth in and through Blake's work -- and why disagreements, debates, abstraction, and accepting its unattainability can all help us approximate a shared truth.

Science fiction often uses a futuristic setting to discuss issues a society faces in the present. Carolyn Burlingame-Goff gives an introduction into Star Trek and its socially progressive roots, as well as its development over time. We discuss some of the ways in which a future setting can help debate current problems, and what some of the implications of this might be.

Virgil's Aeneid is one of the cornerstones of the Western canon and has influenced many works of literature in the millennia since its original composition. It is both a story of a mythical hero, Aeneas, connected to Homeric epics and the gods, and one of Rome's recent history and contemporary place in the world. Anthony Barrett gives an introduction to the Aeneid and shows how Virgil interweaves mythical with contemporary references and uses the setting of another place and another time to paint a picture of his present.

In his 1967 lecture 'Of Other Spaces', Michel Foucault develops the concept of heterotopias, 'counter-sites' which exist as physical locations in every civilization throughout history. These other spaces can mirror or oppose the structures of dominant society, they can be spaces of deviation, and they can be inherently contradictory and fragmented. They can also -- as with much of the literature discussed in this lecture series -- subvert or stabilise a status quo. We explore the concept in the context of Foucault's work as well as in that of the 21st century, and use Foucault's closing argument of the ship as the 'heterotopia par excellence' to discuss the close relationship between fictional and real-life space travel.

The 16th and 17th century saw a lot of hardship and social unrest -- and in response to that, calls for social reform, some of which came in the form of utopian visions of society. Kathrin Pfister introduces some of the central utopian projects of the 17th century, which range from general principles to very concrete ideas of founding an alternative society. We discuss hierarchies, the organisation and dissemination of knowledge, and ways of funding an island utopia through alchemical cleaning supplies -- and why, in the real world as well as in fiction, sometimes the idea of a utopian alternative has to be elsewhere.

All speculative fiction has elements which are not quite of our world, and sometimes, it is precisely this which allows it to effectively comment on the social context it originated in. On the spectrum we have opened up before in this lecture series -- between escapism and social critique -- N.K. Jemisin's work certainly falls more towards the potentially subversive end. Jula Maasböl introduces one of Jemisin's most popular series, the Broken Earth trilogy, and her latest novel, The City We Became, to show how these texts use different settings and narrative strategies to communicate ideas of fragmantation, diversity, and the importance of sharing stories from different voices to piece together a common reality.

Even after they had gained political independence, the United States were still in many ways tied to the European continent and their colonial origins -- including in terms of cultural identity. Washington Irving was one of the authors writing in the Early Republic, and elements from his texts -- from headless horsemen to holiday traditions -- are still popular even among those unfamiliar with his work. We discuss two of Irving's most famous short stories, 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' and 'Rip Van Winkle', which PD Dr Philipp Löffler situates within the transatlantic tensions of their publication context.

When it comes to fantasy literature, there is no lack of gods, cults, and implicit and explicit religious references. In this episode, we take a closer look at works by two authors who approach religion in very different ways: J.R.R. Tolkien and Philip Pullman. Using allusions to Christian themes as a guiding thread, we discuss topics such as representations of good and evil, divine providence and free will, the loss of innocence and coming of age, and the human soul in opposition to restrictive institutions -- and ultimately, despite their diverging premises, find similarities at the heart of The Lord of the Rings and His Dark Materials as well.

Virginia Woolf's work is often analysed through an autobiographical lens, which places characters and situations from her novels in immediate relation with Woolf's life -- so her own time and place. However, as Dr Corinna Assmann and Cara Vorbeck argue, there is another dimension to these texts: narrative strategies by which the narrator takes on a variety of perspectives, providing different and often highly subjective points of view on the same scene. From the multiperspectivity of Mrs Dalloway to a dog as a focaliser in Flush, these examples not only allow for a commentary on modernism, but also show how different physical experiences can influence perspectives.