“Face your future, fight your past”: studying the time travel narrative as a genre and as desire

Abstract

This research discusses the fascination and popularity of time travel as a theme in popular culture, and in particular in film. Utilizing Rick Altman’s 1999 semantic/syntactic/pragmatic approach, it is tested not only if the time travel narrative can be considered a genre in film, but also if it reveals insights on cultural and/or societal desires and fantasies.