Archive for 2024
Call For Chapters: Unspool: Critical Time Loops in Screen Media Edited by Nick JonesIn time loop media, characters (and audiences) find themselves repeating a particular moment over and over again, usually without wanting to and without initially knowing why, and resolution is invariably sought by breaking this cycle. Perhaps most famously featured in the 1993 film Groundhog Day, in the last ten years time loops have become widespread in screen media across a range of genres, budgets, and contexts. Notable examples are not hard to find across cinema (such as Edge of Tomorrow (2014), Happy Death Day (2017)), television (Russian Doll (2019-2022), The Lazarus Project (2022-23)), or videogames (Twelve Minutes (2021), The Outer Wilds (2019)). Further to these examples, time loops feature as smaller but still integral aspects of larger films and TV series – as in the case of Loki (2021-23), The Flash (2023), Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), and one-off episodes of The X-Files (“Monday”) and Doctor Who (“Heaven Sent”) – while the foundational structure of videogames evokes the try, reset, and try again mindset of the loop. In each of these cases (and many more), time loops create a distinctive rhythm and mode of address which is consistent across film, television, and videogames in their logic of iteration, investigation, exhaustion, and (perhaps) eventual epiphany. For all that it is highly schematic, the time loop is simultaneously an extraordinarily supple and diverse format. This edited collection will reveal the critical potential of loops, the way they explore, comment on, reflect, or dissect wider cultural phenomena. It will apply a broad range of approaches – such as aesthetics, psychology, representation, ethics, etc. – and in doing so will take discussions of the loop beyond questions of narrative. After all, while the time loop may be a form of the wider story device of time travel (Jones & Ormrod 2015; Wittenberg 2013), it is a very distinctive one, deserving of its own sustained discussion. Deeply connected to contemporary socio-cultural life, loops speak to the hopelessness of digital doomscrolling (Stoeber 2022), transmedia networks and agency (Lahdenperä 2018), experiences of lockdown in a pandemic (Secor & Blum 2023), imperatives of neoliberal improvement (Yoshimoto 2016), nihilism and cycles of violence (Geller 2021), optimism and mastery (Evans 2023; Schniedermann 2023), urban immersion and community (Posner 2021), and even the financialisation of the future in the form of derivative trading (Klotz 2019). Extending this prior work, and with Edinburgh University Press interested in publication, this first book-length exploration of the time loop across different screen media will show the significance of the loop to our inherently loopy times.
Chapters might consist of extended case studies of particular texts, comparative analyses of a range of texts, or comprehensive considerations of loop logic itself, but they must discuss time loops (as opposed to more generic time travel) and consider cultural contexts in some way (as opposed to being solely about narrative operations). Authors may explore, but are in no ways limited to, the following piecemeal and very random laundry list of topics:
The intrinsic connections between time loops and videogames Training and indoctrination (eg Edge of Tomorrow, Boss Level) Exhaustion and nihilism (eg 12:01, Palm Springs) Terrorism and political economy (eg Source Code) The adaptation of other texts into time loops, and to what end (eg Elsinore) The relationship of time loops to alternate realities, multiverses, and quantum physics (eg The Flash, Happy Death Day 2 U, Palm Springs, Rick and Morty) Duplicating characters and questions of identity (eg Loki, Deathloop) Processes by which loops are escaped, broken, or otherwise resolved Digital systems, virtual realities, and the posthuman (eg Westworld, Source Code) Trauma and mental health (eg Life After Life, Returnal) The use of loops and looping within rebooting or nostalgic media (eg The Matrix Resurrections)
Please submit proposals of 300-500 words with a short biography and contact information to Nick Jones at (n.jones /at/ york.ac.uk) by 20th October 2024. You are also very welcome to contact me with any questions or clarifications, or if you’d like to workshop a potential chapter topic or approach.
Notice of acceptance will be sent by the end of November 2024, and draft chapters of 7-8,000 words (including references) will be due in May 2025.
BibliographyMonica Evans. 2023. “‘Should My Best Prove Insufficient, We Will Find Another Way’: Time Loop Mechanics as Expressions of Hope in Digital Games,” in X. Fang (ed) HCI in Games proceedings. Switzerland: Springer: 198-209. Jacob Geller. 2021. “Time Loop Nihilism,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZrEayPIrVE. Matthew Jones and Joan Ormrod (eds). 2015. Time Travel in Popular Media: Essays on Film, Television, Literature and Video Games. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Marcia Klotz. 2019. “Of Time Loops and Derivatives: Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar,” CR: The New Centennial Review 19.1: 277-298. Linda Lahdenperä. 2018. “‘Live-Die-Repeat’: The Time Loop as a Narrative and a Game Mechanic,” International Journal of Transmedia Literacy (IJTL) 4: 137-159. Orin Posner. 2020. “Re-living the city: The Urban Time-Loop of Russian Doll,” Frontiers of Narrative Studies 6.2: 213-230. Anna J Secor and Virginia Blum. 2023. “Lockdown Time, Time Loops, and the Crisis of the Future,” Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 28.2: 250-267 Jenna Stoeber, “Time Loops are a Weird Genre for an Anxious Time,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWEVGbVoxQ4. David Wittenberg. 2013. Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative. New York: Fordham University Press. Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto. 2016. “Cinematic Repetition and Neoliberal Subjectivity,” Transcommunication 3.1: 123-135
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