Surprisingly enough, writing that is full of "time-travel" and "parallel worlds" is not confined to the science fiction genre, said Leslie Adelson, professor of modern German literature, and they can be used more as a stylistic tool for social commentary than for thrilling narrative entertainment.

Adelson, recently named the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of German Studies at Cornell, made this point in a lecture, "The Future of Futurity: Time Travel, Parallel Worlds and 21st-Century German Literature by Alexander Kluge and Yoko Tawada," to a packed Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium July 25.

For her lecture, Adelson, who directs Cornell's Institute of German Cultural Studies, conducted a textual analysis of some of both Kluge's and Tawada's recent writing in order to challenge not only the dominant scholarly approaches to understanding each author's work, but also to establish a broader perception of the concept and use of "futurity" in modern German literature.

In literary scholarship, futurity, which Adelson described as "ideas about what can or should be in the future," was widely understood to have migrated from the utopian writing of the European communist project into the realm of science fiction after the fall of the U.S.S.R. in 1989. This was argued by influential Marxist theorist Frederick Jameson.

However, as she investigated more recent work by Tawada and Kluge, Adelson became convinced that more "sophisticated" terminology and categories beyond just "utopian" or "science fiction" writing were needed to describe how these German authors engage with futurity.

Tawada, a Japanese-born, award-winning writer whom some critics have called "multicultural Germany's most thoughtful example of a bilingual auteur," according to Adelson, is well-known for exploring the politically charged theme of "parallel societies" in contemporary Germany -- a term used in reference to the ethnic minority and immigrant communities that some believe will never fully integrate German society.

Adelson demonstrated that Tawada's writing is also focused on engaging parallel realities in time, and not only in physical or cultural space. In one essay Tawada is shown by Adelson to use a "time-traveling" narrative style where the narrator is constantly encountering stories and voices from the past in an almost haphazard, episodic format. For Adelson this "circuitous" pilgrimage in time leaves not only the narrator of the story changed, but impresses upon Tawada's readers the possibility of being changed by journeying in reading themselves.

Kluge, a renowned literary theorist and filmmaker, is mostly known for his "excavations" of Germany's violent past and his "quirky" and hopeful explorations of its better future. For Adelson, though, Kluge has recently shown a propensity to write about "parallel worlds," the tricky dimension(s) of time and "invisible phenomena," influenced by advances in modern physics at the turn of the century.

Adelson argues that Kluge's emphasis on time-travel in the text (through various stylistic and narrative techniques) as well as his playful references to alternate dimensions and extraterrestrial beings are tools to get his readers "to practice perceiving invisible dimensions of reality," like the past and future.

As noted by Adelson, no one ever sees or describes extraterrestrials in Kluge's short stories; they are simply known to exist, as invisible but real phenomena, much like the past and future in people's minds.

Adelson's lecture was part of Cornell's six-week School of Criticism and Theory Public Lecture series.

Paul Bennetch '12 is a writer intern for the Cornell Chronicle.