Table Of Contentthe fascination with unknown time
edited by sibylle baumbach,
lena henningsen, klaus oschema
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The Fascination with Unknown Time
Sibylle Baumbach · Lena Henningsen
Klaus Oschema
Editors
The Fascination with
Unknown Time
Editors
Sibylle Baumbach Klaus Oschema
Department of English Department of History
University of Innsbruck Ruhr University Bochum
Innsbruck, Tirol Bochum, Nordrhein-Westfalen
Austria Germany
Lena Henningsen
Department of Chinese Studies
University of Freiburg
Freiburg, Baden-Württemberg
Germany
ISBN 978-3-319-66437-8 ISBN 978-3-319-66438-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-66438-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017950717
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
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reface
The subject of this volume is so vast and rich that it can only be explored
in broad interdisciplinary dialogue. Our aim was to include a wide
range of disciplines from the humanities to address different facets of
the fascination with time and to open up new avenues for its analysis
by transgressing established disciplinary boundaries. This endeavor was
largely made possible by the fertile and flexible framework for transdis-
ciplinary collaboration offered by the German Young Academy (Die
Junge Akademie) at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and
Humanities and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.
Since its foundation in 2000, Die Junge Akademie has enabled vibrant
cooperation and exchange among researchers from a wide range of dis-
ciplines in the sciences and the humanities. It also facilitated a project in
which three scholars, working on early modern English literature, con-
temporary Chinese Studies, and medieval history, respectively, collabo-
rated to explore a challenging and multi-faceted subject. Our work in the
context of the Young Academy’s Research Group “Fascination” resulted,
amongst others, in a three-day conference at Berlin (9–11 July 2014) at
which the first drafts of the contributions to this volume were presented
and discussed in a committed, vivid, and—most of all—friendly and pro-
ductive atmosphere. Based on this conference and the great potential of
the transdisciplinary approach to the fascination with time, we decided to
compile a volume on the topic to introduce this new research area and
promote further research on the topic.
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vi PREFACE
We thank all the contributors for engaging in the interdisciplinary dia-
logue, both at the initial conference and during the preparation of this
volume, and for their constructive feedback and their patience during the
editing process. We are particularly grateful to Walther Ch. Zimmerli,
who, as our keynote speaker at the conference but also beyond, provided
important input from a philosophical perspective. Our thanks also go to
the Young Academy for funding a conference on this topic and to the
team of the Young Academy’s office in Berlin who helped tremendously
with the logistics connected with both the conference and numerous
meetings of the working group on “Fascination.” We also thank Christof
Diem for his editorial assistance in preparing this volume for publication.
Finally, we thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions
and the editors at Palgrave Macmillan for their superb support in bring-
ing this book to publication.
Innsbruck, Austria Sibylle Baumbach
Freiburg, Germany Lena Henningsen
Bochum, Germany Klaus Oschema
a
cknowledgements
The preparation of this publication has been generously supported by
Die Junge Akademie.
The Junge Akademie was founded in 2000 as the first academy for the
new academic generation worldwide. The fifty members of the Junge
Akademie, young academics and artists from German-speaking countries,
are dedicated to interdisciplinary discourse and are active at the inter-
faces between academia and society. The Junge Akademie is supported by
the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW)
and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. The office is
located in Berlin.
vii
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ontents
1 Time in the Making: Why All the Fuss About Time?
On Time, the Unknown, and Fascination 1
Sibylle Baumbach, Lena Henningsen and Klaus Oschema
Part I Past Futures
2 The Old Made New: Medieval Repurposing of
Prophecies 23
Anke Holdenried
3 ‘Wunschzeit’ Jerusalem: Rethinking the Distinction
Between Time and Space in Medieval Utopias 43
Christian Hoffarth
4 Living on the Edge of Time: Temporal Patterns and
Irregularities in Byzantine Historical Apocalypses 71
András Kraft
5 Unknown or Uncertain? Astrologers, the Church,
and the Future in the Late Middle Ages 93
Klaus Oschema
ix
x CONTENTS
6 ‘From the Unknown to the Known and Backwards:’
Representing and Presenting Remote Time in
Nineteenth-Century Palaeontology 115
Marco Tamborini
Part II Unknown Presents
7 Introducing Time to Ethnographic Displays: Narrative
Strategies of Revealing the Unknown in German
Ethnological Museums 143
Katja Wehde
8 “God’s Time Is the Best:” The Fascination with
Unknown Time in Urban Transport in Lagos 167
Daniel E. Agbiboa
9 Perpetual Wanderers—Timeless Heroes: Gypsies in
European Musical Culture 189
Anna G. Piotrowska
10 The Present: An ‘Unknown Time’ in the German
Kaiserreich around 1900 211
Caroline Rothauge
Part III Future Pasts
11 The Time-Image and the Unknown in Wong Kar-wai’s
Film Art 233
Dorothee Xiaolong Hou and Sheldon H. Lu
12 Suspense in the Cinema: Knowledge and Time 251
Hauke Lehmann
CONTENTS xi
13 Futurology, Allegory, Time Travel: What Makes Science
Fiction Fascinating 273
Kai Wiegandt
Index 293
