Papers by Orin Posner
Science Fiction Studies, 2025
Forthcoming article in Science Fiction Studies Vol. 52, Issue 3 (November 2025)
This article exa... more Forthcoming article in Science Fiction Studies Vol. 52, Issue 3 (November 2025)
This article examines the hybridization of science fiction (sf) and detective fiction (df) as a literary reflection of spatial and epistemological instability. Analyzing three contemporary sf-df hybrids—China Miéville’s The City and the City (2009), Adam Roberts’ The Real-Town Murders (2017), and Malka Older’s The Mimicking of Known Successes (2023)—it explores how these texts use both genres to highlight the entanglement of spatial ontology (physical space) and spatial epistemology (the perception and understanding of space). Furthermore, by employing sf’s spatial novums alongside df’s spatial mysteries, these texts present spatial boundaries as malleable, open to manipulation through misinformation and conspiracy. In all three texts, the mystery plots destabilize the fictional worlds’ spatial rules, uncovering conspiracies orchestrated by figures of institutional authority. In this, the narratives reflect contemporary concerns about the erosion of trust in traditional systems of knowledge and power. This study demonstrates how sf-df hybrids engage with the precarities of space, knowledge, and power, resonating with the experiences of readers navigating an increasingly fragmented and uncertain world.
JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, 2026
Forthcoming article in JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory Vol. 56, Issue 1.
This article seeks to ... more Forthcoming article in JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory Vol. 56, Issue 1.
This article seeks to define the chronotope of maintenance as it emerges in narratives that combine the science fiction (SF) and climate fiction (CF) genres, and specifically in two recent SF-CF novels: Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2017 New York 2140 and Gabrielle Korn’s 2023 Yours for the Taking. The chronotope of maintenance is a literary spacetime in which constant risk generates the constant performance of maintenance and care work; this enables present conditions to continue into the future, and renders characters active agents who act upon and bring into being both space and time. Through the SF novum – a novel element of the SF fictional world, such as a new technology or social organization – the SF-CF narrative constructs a chronotope wherein climate risk, prevalent in CF, is both alleviated and problematized. Instead of depicting helpless anticipation for further environmental risks, these narratives afford humans with agency over time and space. This agency is framed as an optimistic solution to climate change and to class disparity, but also, and especially in Korn’s novel, as the possible cause of dangerous, authoritative endeavors.
American Science Fiction Television and Space: Productions and (Re)configurations (1987-2021), 2023
Open Access: https://rdcu.be/c7645
“San Junipero,” the 2016 episode of dark science-fiction (S... more Open Access: https://rdcu.be/c7645
“San Junipero,” the 2016 episode of dark science-fiction (SF) anthology series Black Mirror, is an exception in the series, appearing as an optimistic, joyful SF text that explores a technology-enabled utopia. The episode imagines a virtual reality (VR) where old and dying people can spend time in “immersive nostalgia therapy” as avatars of their younger selves and even cross over permanently after their death. For the episode’s disabled, gay protagonist, Yorkie (Mackenzie Davis), this virtual space offers liberation from both physical and societal limitations; San Junipero seems to function as a queer and transhuman utopia for Yorkie and her lover, Kelly (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), offering an alternative spatiotemporality through its nostalgic spaces. However, rather than presenting viewers with a true queer utopia, I argue that “San Junipero” offers a queer spatial critique of some of SF’s basic tools of storytelling, revealing the limitations of SF narratives to imagine a future utopia. The episode does so by constructing a horizonal space-time of liminality—not a utopia, but the road, perhaps, toward a future utopia. Utopia itself is positioned outside of the narrative: in the suggestion for what may exist after the credits roll, and in the readings of the episode’s audience. Queer utopia is thus left as a space that queer characters and viewers create for themselves, through hopeful, reparative readings: reconfiguring straight, normative, limiting spaces (e.g., the VR’s various nostalgic frozen pasts) into fluid, liberatory spaces.
Frontiers of Narrative Studies, 2020
This article discusses the first season of the television series Russian Doll (2019–), analyzing ... more This article discusses the first season of the television series Russian Doll (2019–), analyzing its time-loop structure through a narratological lens with focus on the significance of its setting to the narrative’s overall message on social connection in the city. The narrative’s chronotope of urban space and repetitive temporality works to reflect the internal struggles of its two protagonists (Natasha Lyonne and Charlie Barnett), but also a contemporary collective trauma and inability to imagine a different future – a narrative mode that Gomel and Karti Shemtov (2018) term “limbotopia”. However, Russian Doll is ultimately optimistic, allowing its protagonists to break out of their limbotopic time loops and move towards a transformative conclusion of regained hope for the future. The narrative device of the time loop pushes the characters to immerse themselves in their space: joining other people in the city and creating a community.
Conference Presentations by Orin Posner
Paper presented at the International Society for the Study of Narrative Annual Conference, 2024.
... more Paper presented at the International Society for the Study of Narrative Annual Conference, 2024.
This paper examines how urban climate-fiction/science-fiction narratives construct what I call the chronotope of maintenance: a continuous present in which characters face environmental risks that they constantly work to manage, rendering time and space active. The climate-fiction texts I analyze (primarily Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2017 novel New York 2140) focus on the work of architectural and social maintenance through which the climate crisis is mitigated: reusing old buildings as well as building and caring for communities. Through the centering of maintenance, these narratives reconfigure climate-fiction’s chronotope of risk into a chronotope of maintenance, emerging as literary sites of endurance and hope.
As a genre, climate fiction’s depictions of the climatically-changed planet have largely moved away from portrayals of apocalyptic destruction towards depictions of risk societies (Heise 2008, Johns-Putra 2016, Bracke 2020), or chronotopes of risk: anticipatory temporality for future environmental disasters within a precarious, dangerous space. The texts I discuss here offer a more hopeful approach through focus on characters’ maintenance and care work; the narrative thus overlays the space-time of risk with personal and communal agency, and produces a narrative time of maintenance.
Katherine Kruger (2023) defines the narrative time of maintenance as slow-paced, fragmentary, and based on waiting, implying a connection to the future – a time frame especially fitting for depictions of climate change. As a hyperobject “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” (Morton 2013), climate change and the “slow violence” that it enacts are often unintelligible (Nixon 2011). Robinson’s New York 2140 renders climate change not only representable, but manageable: the fragmented, polyphonic narrative centers characters’ unexceptional, everyday maintenance of both their architectural and social spaces within a partially-flooded and socially-stratified New York City. The new, science-fictional architecture/technology of the novel is sidelined in favor of focus on communal, urban maintenance work: actively sustaining the present and shaping the future. The result is a chronotope in which time moves in accordance with human action, allowing the climatically-changed city – and its people – to persist.
Paper presented at Tel-Aviv University's Department of English Literature's Graduate Conference -... more Paper presented at Tel-Aviv University's Department of English Literature's Graduate Conference - Literary Communications: The Question of Literature as Dialogue (2024)
This conference talk was filmed and is available to watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/NOn409CDJsg?si=ReX2fTl7HmrWjRKa
Singer-songwriter and international superstar Taylor Swift has been a subject of both popular debate and academic scholarship for over a decade, discussing both the cultural significance of Swift as celebrity and the artistic aspects of her work. In this talk, I analyze Swift’s song lyrics through a narratological approach, focusing on one recurring theme throughout her body of work: children’s loss of innocence. I illustrate the progression of Swift’s approach to childhood through a survey of her songs on the topic and through a close reading of the song “Robin” from Swift’s latest album, The Tortured Poets Department (2024).
While many of Swift’s songs are constructed as dialogue, employing second-person addresses (e.g. “I want you to know”), I argue that second-person addresses have a special function in her songs about childhood. For example, in the 2010 song “Never Grow Up” the speaker addresses a child but then shifts to contemplating her own loss of innocence.
In “The Best Day” (2008) the speaker is a child addressing their parents, and childhood innocence is portrayed as lack of knowledge, with lines such as “I don’t know why all the trees change in the fall” and “don’t know how my friends could be so mean.” In 2024, “Robin” centers this same childhood innocence-as-ignorance through an adult perspective, now completely detached from childhood. The song is narrated in first-person plural – a child’s family or community – and is rife with ironic tension between the child world and the adult world, highlighted by the repeated line “you have no idea.” The horrors of the adult world, of which the child knows nothing, are only hinted at. This song’s dialogue with childhood therefore relies on listeners’ knowledge and on them adopting the speaker’s perspective of an adult looking at a child from the outside.
“Queer Nostalgic Utopia in Flux: Imagining the Future through the Past in Black Mirror’s ‘San Jun... more “Queer Nostalgic Utopia in Flux: Imagining the Future through the Past in Black Mirror’s ‘San Junipero’” (in Hebrew)
Paper presented at “Back to the Future: Real and Imagined Futures in a Historical Perspective” (2023) – Annual Doctoral Student and Postdoctoral Fellows Conference in the Humanities, Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies and the Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University.
This conference talk was filmed and is available to watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/xtnTFK8czos
The paper was based in part on my article:
“Heaven is a Place on Earth”?: Configuring the Horizon of Queer Utopia in Black Mirror’s “San Junipero”, in American Science Fiction Television and Space: Productions and (Re)configurations (1987-2021), edited by Joel Hawkes, Alexander Christie, and Thomas Nienhuis. Palgrave Macmillan.
Paper presented at the International Society for the Study of Narrative Annual Conference, 2019.
Paper presented at Tel-Aviv University's Department of English Literature's Graduate Conference -... more Paper presented at Tel-Aviv University's Department of English Literature's Graduate Conference - Invention and Convention: Authors and Their Work in the Literary Traditions of British Culture (2016).
Is Sherlock Holmes real? This paper is an attempt to separate the factual from the fictional in the great, mythological figure of Sherlock Holmes. I'm asking: who is Sherlock Holmes? and how do we know who he is? Like the great detective himself, we will try searching for the truth: defining what the truth it, and separating it from fiction, if it is at all possible to separate reality from the representation of reality. Discussing both Arthur Conan Doyle's original Holmes stories and Mitch Cullin's 2005 novel A Slight Trick of the Mind.
Paper presented at Tel-Aviv University's Third Annual Science Fiction Symposium: the Timescapes o... more Paper presented at Tel-Aviv University's Third Annual Science Fiction Symposium: the Timescapes of Science Fiction (2016).
Discussing the representation of posthuman characters in narrative, I'm asking: is it possible to represent in a narrative text a subject who is not wholly human, but rather, posthuman? I suggest that in order to represent a posthuman character, the narrative structure must be unconventional and employ innovative techniques.
This is exemplified by two short science fiction stories, in which there's a manipulation of traditional temporality, and whose protagonists I consider to be posthuman: "Memento Mori" by Jonathan Nolan and "A Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang.
Uploads
Papers by Orin Posner
This article examines the hybridization of science fiction (sf) and detective fiction (df) as a literary reflection of spatial and epistemological instability. Analyzing three contemporary sf-df hybrids—China Miéville’s The City and the City (2009), Adam Roberts’ The Real-Town Murders (2017), and Malka Older’s The Mimicking of Known Successes (2023)—it explores how these texts use both genres to highlight the entanglement of spatial ontology (physical space) and spatial epistemology (the perception and understanding of space). Furthermore, by employing sf’s spatial novums alongside df’s spatial mysteries, these texts present spatial boundaries as malleable, open to manipulation through misinformation and conspiracy. In all three texts, the mystery plots destabilize the fictional worlds’ spatial rules, uncovering conspiracies orchestrated by figures of institutional authority. In this, the narratives reflect contemporary concerns about the erosion of trust in traditional systems of knowledge and power. This study demonstrates how sf-df hybrids engage with the precarities of space, knowledge, and power, resonating with the experiences of readers navigating an increasingly fragmented and uncertain world.
This article seeks to define the chronotope of maintenance as it emerges in narratives that combine the science fiction (SF) and climate fiction (CF) genres, and specifically in two recent SF-CF novels: Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2017 New York 2140 and Gabrielle Korn’s 2023 Yours for the Taking. The chronotope of maintenance is a literary spacetime in which constant risk generates the constant performance of maintenance and care work; this enables present conditions to continue into the future, and renders characters active agents who act upon and bring into being both space and time. Through the SF novum – a novel element of the SF fictional world, such as a new technology or social organization – the SF-CF narrative constructs a chronotope wherein climate risk, prevalent in CF, is both alleviated and problematized. Instead of depicting helpless anticipation for further environmental risks, these narratives afford humans with agency over time and space. This agency is framed as an optimistic solution to climate change and to class disparity, but also, and especially in Korn’s novel, as the possible cause of dangerous, authoritative endeavors.
“San Junipero,” the 2016 episode of dark science-fiction (SF) anthology series Black Mirror, is an exception in the series, appearing as an optimistic, joyful SF text that explores a technology-enabled utopia. The episode imagines a virtual reality (VR) where old and dying people can spend time in “immersive nostalgia therapy” as avatars of their younger selves and even cross over permanently after their death. For the episode’s disabled, gay protagonist, Yorkie (Mackenzie Davis), this virtual space offers liberation from both physical and societal limitations; San Junipero seems to function as a queer and transhuman utopia for Yorkie and her lover, Kelly (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), offering an alternative spatiotemporality through its nostalgic spaces. However, rather than presenting viewers with a true queer utopia, I argue that “San Junipero” offers a queer spatial critique of some of SF’s basic tools of storytelling, revealing the limitations of SF narratives to imagine a future utopia. The episode does so by constructing a horizonal space-time of liminality—not a utopia, but the road, perhaps, toward a future utopia. Utopia itself is positioned outside of the narrative: in the suggestion for what may exist after the credits roll, and in the readings of the episode’s audience. Queer utopia is thus left as a space that queer characters and viewers create for themselves, through hopeful, reparative readings: reconfiguring straight, normative, limiting spaces (e.g., the VR’s various nostalgic frozen pasts) into fluid, liberatory spaces.
Conference Presentations by Orin Posner
This paper examines how urban climate-fiction/science-fiction narratives construct what I call the chronotope of maintenance: a continuous present in which characters face environmental risks that they constantly work to manage, rendering time and space active. The climate-fiction texts I analyze (primarily Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2017 novel New York 2140) focus on the work of architectural and social maintenance through which the climate crisis is mitigated: reusing old buildings as well as building and caring for communities. Through the centering of maintenance, these narratives reconfigure climate-fiction’s chronotope of risk into a chronotope of maintenance, emerging as literary sites of endurance and hope.
As a genre, climate fiction’s depictions of the climatically-changed planet have largely moved away from portrayals of apocalyptic destruction towards depictions of risk societies (Heise 2008, Johns-Putra 2016, Bracke 2020), or chronotopes of risk: anticipatory temporality for future environmental disasters within a precarious, dangerous space. The texts I discuss here offer a more hopeful approach through focus on characters’ maintenance and care work; the narrative thus overlays the space-time of risk with personal and communal agency, and produces a narrative time of maintenance.
Katherine Kruger (2023) defines the narrative time of maintenance as slow-paced, fragmentary, and based on waiting, implying a connection to the future – a time frame especially fitting for depictions of climate change. As a hyperobject “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” (Morton 2013), climate change and the “slow violence” that it enacts are often unintelligible (Nixon 2011). Robinson’s New York 2140 renders climate change not only representable, but manageable: the fragmented, polyphonic narrative centers characters’ unexceptional, everyday maintenance of both their architectural and social spaces within a partially-flooded and socially-stratified New York City. The new, science-fictional architecture/technology of the novel is sidelined in favor of focus on communal, urban maintenance work: actively sustaining the present and shaping the future. The result is a chronotope in which time moves in accordance with human action, allowing the climatically-changed city – and its people – to persist.
This conference talk was filmed and is available to watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/NOn409CDJsg?si=ReX2fTl7HmrWjRKa
Singer-songwriter and international superstar Taylor Swift has been a subject of both popular debate and academic scholarship for over a decade, discussing both the cultural significance of Swift as celebrity and the artistic aspects of her work. In this talk, I analyze Swift’s song lyrics through a narratological approach, focusing on one recurring theme throughout her body of work: children’s loss of innocence. I illustrate the progression of Swift’s approach to childhood through a survey of her songs on the topic and through a close reading of the song “Robin” from Swift’s latest album, The Tortured Poets Department (2024).
While many of Swift’s songs are constructed as dialogue, employing second-person addresses (e.g. “I want you to know”), I argue that second-person addresses have a special function in her songs about childhood. For example, in the 2010 song “Never Grow Up” the speaker addresses a child but then shifts to contemplating her own loss of innocence.
In “The Best Day” (2008) the speaker is a child addressing their parents, and childhood innocence is portrayed as lack of knowledge, with lines such as “I don’t know why all the trees change in the fall” and “don’t know how my friends could be so mean.” In 2024, “Robin” centers this same childhood innocence-as-ignorance through an adult perspective, now completely detached from childhood. The song is narrated in first-person plural – a child’s family or community – and is rife with ironic tension between the child world and the adult world, highlighted by the repeated line “you have no idea.” The horrors of the adult world, of which the child knows nothing, are only hinted at. This song’s dialogue with childhood therefore relies on listeners’ knowledge and on them adopting the speaker’s perspective of an adult looking at a child from the outside.
Paper presented at “Back to the Future: Real and Imagined Futures in a Historical Perspective” (2023) – Annual Doctoral Student and Postdoctoral Fellows Conference in the Humanities, Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies and the Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University.
This conference talk was filmed and is available to watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/xtnTFK8czos
The paper was based in part on my article:
“Heaven is a Place on Earth”?: Configuring the Horizon of Queer Utopia in Black Mirror’s “San Junipero”, in American Science Fiction Television and Space: Productions and (Re)configurations (1987-2021), edited by Joel Hawkes, Alexander Christie, and Thomas Nienhuis. Palgrave Macmillan.
Is Sherlock Holmes real? This paper is an attempt to separate the factual from the fictional in the great, mythological figure of Sherlock Holmes. I'm asking: who is Sherlock Holmes? and how do we know who he is? Like the great detective himself, we will try searching for the truth: defining what the truth it, and separating it from fiction, if it is at all possible to separate reality from the representation of reality. Discussing both Arthur Conan Doyle's original Holmes stories and Mitch Cullin's 2005 novel A Slight Trick of the Mind.
Discussing the representation of posthuman characters in narrative, I'm asking: is it possible to represent in a narrative text a subject who is not wholly human, but rather, posthuman? I suggest that in order to represent a posthuman character, the narrative structure must be unconventional and employ innovative techniques.
This is exemplified by two short science fiction stories, in which there's a manipulation of traditional temporality, and whose protagonists I consider to be posthuman: "Memento Mori" by Jonathan Nolan and "A Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang.
This article examines the hybridization of science fiction (sf) and detective fiction (df) as a literary reflection of spatial and epistemological instability. Analyzing three contemporary sf-df hybrids—China Miéville’s The City and the City (2009), Adam Roberts’ The Real-Town Murders (2017), and Malka Older’s The Mimicking of Known Successes (2023)—it explores how these texts use both genres to highlight the entanglement of spatial ontology (physical space) and spatial epistemology (the perception and understanding of space). Furthermore, by employing sf’s spatial novums alongside df’s spatial mysteries, these texts present spatial boundaries as malleable, open to manipulation through misinformation and conspiracy. In all three texts, the mystery plots destabilize the fictional worlds’ spatial rules, uncovering conspiracies orchestrated by figures of institutional authority. In this, the narratives reflect contemporary concerns about the erosion of trust in traditional systems of knowledge and power. This study demonstrates how sf-df hybrids engage with the precarities of space, knowledge, and power, resonating with the experiences of readers navigating an increasingly fragmented and uncertain world.
This article seeks to define the chronotope of maintenance as it emerges in narratives that combine the science fiction (SF) and climate fiction (CF) genres, and specifically in two recent SF-CF novels: Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2017 New York 2140 and Gabrielle Korn’s 2023 Yours for the Taking. The chronotope of maintenance is a literary spacetime in which constant risk generates the constant performance of maintenance and care work; this enables present conditions to continue into the future, and renders characters active agents who act upon and bring into being both space and time. Through the SF novum – a novel element of the SF fictional world, such as a new technology or social organization – the SF-CF narrative constructs a chronotope wherein climate risk, prevalent in CF, is both alleviated and problematized. Instead of depicting helpless anticipation for further environmental risks, these narratives afford humans with agency over time and space. This agency is framed as an optimistic solution to climate change and to class disparity, but also, and especially in Korn’s novel, as the possible cause of dangerous, authoritative endeavors.
“San Junipero,” the 2016 episode of dark science-fiction (SF) anthology series Black Mirror, is an exception in the series, appearing as an optimistic, joyful SF text that explores a technology-enabled utopia. The episode imagines a virtual reality (VR) where old and dying people can spend time in “immersive nostalgia therapy” as avatars of their younger selves and even cross over permanently after their death. For the episode’s disabled, gay protagonist, Yorkie (Mackenzie Davis), this virtual space offers liberation from both physical and societal limitations; San Junipero seems to function as a queer and transhuman utopia for Yorkie and her lover, Kelly (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), offering an alternative spatiotemporality through its nostalgic spaces. However, rather than presenting viewers with a true queer utopia, I argue that “San Junipero” offers a queer spatial critique of some of SF’s basic tools of storytelling, revealing the limitations of SF narratives to imagine a future utopia. The episode does so by constructing a horizonal space-time of liminality—not a utopia, but the road, perhaps, toward a future utopia. Utopia itself is positioned outside of the narrative: in the suggestion for what may exist after the credits roll, and in the readings of the episode’s audience. Queer utopia is thus left as a space that queer characters and viewers create for themselves, through hopeful, reparative readings: reconfiguring straight, normative, limiting spaces (e.g., the VR’s various nostalgic frozen pasts) into fluid, liberatory spaces.
This paper examines how urban climate-fiction/science-fiction narratives construct what I call the chronotope of maintenance: a continuous present in which characters face environmental risks that they constantly work to manage, rendering time and space active. The climate-fiction texts I analyze (primarily Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2017 novel New York 2140) focus on the work of architectural and social maintenance through which the climate crisis is mitigated: reusing old buildings as well as building and caring for communities. Through the centering of maintenance, these narratives reconfigure climate-fiction’s chronotope of risk into a chronotope of maintenance, emerging as literary sites of endurance and hope.
As a genre, climate fiction’s depictions of the climatically-changed planet have largely moved away from portrayals of apocalyptic destruction towards depictions of risk societies (Heise 2008, Johns-Putra 2016, Bracke 2020), or chronotopes of risk: anticipatory temporality for future environmental disasters within a precarious, dangerous space. The texts I discuss here offer a more hopeful approach through focus on characters’ maintenance and care work; the narrative thus overlays the space-time of risk with personal and communal agency, and produces a narrative time of maintenance.
Katherine Kruger (2023) defines the narrative time of maintenance as slow-paced, fragmentary, and based on waiting, implying a connection to the future – a time frame especially fitting for depictions of climate change. As a hyperobject “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” (Morton 2013), climate change and the “slow violence” that it enacts are often unintelligible (Nixon 2011). Robinson’s New York 2140 renders climate change not only representable, but manageable: the fragmented, polyphonic narrative centers characters’ unexceptional, everyday maintenance of both their architectural and social spaces within a partially-flooded and socially-stratified New York City. The new, science-fictional architecture/technology of the novel is sidelined in favor of focus on communal, urban maintenance work: actively sustaining the present and shaping the future. The result is a chronotope in which time moves in accordance with human action, allowing the climatically-changed city – and its people – to persist.
This conference talk was filmed and is available to watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/NOn409CDJsg?si=ReX2fTl7HmrWjRKa
Singer-songwriter and international superstar Taylor Swift has been a subject of both popular debate and academic scholarship for over a decade, discussing both the cultural significance of Swift as celebrity and the artistic aspects of her work. In this talk, I analyze Swift’s song lyrics through a narratological approach, focusing on one recurring theme throughout her body of work: children’s loss of innocence. I illustrate the progression of Swift’s approach to childhood through a survey of her songs on the topic and through a close reading of the song “Robin” from Swift’s latest album, The Tortured Poets Department (2024).
While many of Swift’s songs are constructed as dialogue, employing second-person addresses (e.g. “I want you to know”), I argue that second-person addresses have a special function in her songs about childhood. For example, in the 2010 song “Never Grow Up” the speaker addresses a child but then shifts to contemplating her own loss of innocence.
In “The Best Day” (2008) the speaker is a child addressing their parents, and childhood innocence is portrayed as lack of knowledge, with lines such as “I don’t know why all the trees change in the fall” and “don’t know how my friends could be so mean.” In 2024, “Robin” centers this same childhood innocence-as-ignorance through an adult perspective, now completely detached from childhood. The song is narrated in first-person plural – a child’s family or community – and is rife with ironic tension between the child world and the adult world, highlighted by the repeated line “you have no idea.” The horrors of the adult world, of which the child knows nothing, are only hinted at. This song’s dialogue with childhood therefore relies on listeners’ knowledge and on them adopting the speaker’s perspective of an adult looking at a child from the outside.
Paper presented at “Back to the Future: Real and Imagined Futures in a Historical Perspective” (2023) – Annual Doctoral Student and Postdoctoral Fellows Conference in the Humanities, Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies and the Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University.
This conference talk was filmed and is available to watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/xtnTFK8czos
The paper was based in part on my article:
“Heaven is a Place on Earth”?: Configuring the Horizon of Queer Utopia in Black Mirror’s “San Junipero”, in American Science Fiction Television and Space: Productions and (Re)configurations (1987-2021), edited by Joel Hawkes, Alexander Christie, and Thomas Nienhuis. Palgrave Macmillan.
Is Sherlock Holmes real? This paper is an attempt to separate the factual from the fictional in the great, mythological figure of Sherlock Holmes. I'm asking: who is Sherlock Holmes? and how do we know who he is? Like the great detective himself, we will try searching for the truth: defining what the truth it, and separating it from fiction, if it is at all possible to separate reality from the representation of reality. Discussing both Arthur Conan Doyle's original Holmes stories and Mitch Cullin's 2005 novel A Slight Trick of the Mind.
Discussing the representation of posthuman characters in narrative, I'm asking: is it possible to represent in a narrative text a subject who is not wholly human, but rather, posthuman? I suggest that in order to represent a posthuman character, the narrative structure must be unconventional and employ innovative techniques.
This is exemplified by two short science fiction stories, in which there's a manipulation of traditional temporality, and whose protagonists I consider to be posthuman: "Memento Mori" by Jonathan Nolan and "A Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang.