Symposium/CfP - In/Out: Forms of Space in Science Fiction, 18-19 March 2018, Israel

The Fifth International Symposium on the Poetics of Science Fiction

Department of English and American Studies, Tel-Aviv University

18-19 March 2018

Submission Deadline: September 30, 2017

Science fiction is inseparable from the idea of space – “the final frontier”, as Star Trek defined it for the general audience. From its very inception in the works of H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, H. Rider Haggard and other 19^th-century writers, SF has been concerned with exploring, mapping and conquering geographical and physical spaces. However, outer space is but one of the many continua the genre has ventured into. With the rise of cyberpunk in the 1990s, cyberspace has joined the iconic settings of SF, soon followed by virtual spaces, dream-spaces, unknown planets, parallel Earths, and utopian or dystopian communities of the future.

Narrative and cultural theories have recently experienced a “spatial turn”, as expressed by a rapidly-growing flood of scholarly articles and monographs concerned with representation of space. Grounded in the pioneering work of Henri Lefebvre and Fredric Jameson, titles such as Stephen Kern’s The Culture of Time and Space (2003), Ryan, Foote, and Azaryahu’s collaboration Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative (2016) and many others have come to epitomize the importance of space in the humanities. But despite the problematic of space receiving critical attention, the spatial poetics of SF has remained relatively under-theorized.