Guest Lecture Susanne Reichl (University of Vienna)

This lecture takes as a starting point the suggestion that time travel stories for young readers are stories of temporary empowerment and develops some ideas about genre and its challenges and affordances. I will introduce structuralist views of genre and series fiction, cognitive perspectives on the reading process, and discuss ethical questions raised by time travel stories, including blind spots of time travel narratives. Eventually I will look critically at whether time travel narratives can be seen as the perfect adventure stories for our times. The texts discussed include Alex Scarrow's TimeRiders series, Damian Dibben's The History Keepers series and Carl Ashmore's The Time Hunters series.

University of Graz   
Department of American Studies
+43 316/380-2465
amerikanistik@uni-graz.at    
http://amerikanistik.uni-graz.at