Abstract
John L. Hennessey defines speculative fiction as a literary canon that mixes familiarity and radical alterity, utilising unrealistic elements to explore hypothetical scenarios or bring aspects of the reader’s world into sharp belief (2024). This paper reads Takano Fumio’s Swan Knight (2024) and Nazlı Eray’s Orpheus (2006) as speculative fiction, contending that both works approach underground spaces as sites of enigmatic encounters and cultural exchange, breaking down the boundaries between popular myths and contemporary realities with the aid of speculative tension. Swan Knight is an imaginative narrative of the biography of Ludwig II of Bavaria. Addicted to binge-watching television and listening to Wagner, Ludwig II visits a labyrinthine subterranean city beneath Munich, where Wanger’s Festspielhaus is located. During his underground adventure, Ludwig confronts Wagner’s dubious legacy and the ambiguous boundary between media, myth, and reality. Similarly, Nazlı Eray’s Orpheus relocates the popular myth to a modern-day Turkish coastal town, where Eurydice searches for Orpheus’s house near an ancient archaeological site. Eray’s use of the fantastic creates an underground world that connects intertextual references and suggestive details, bridging the mythical realm and Turkey’s contemporary social realities. Drawing on Homi Bhabha’s cultural hybridity theory and Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, this paper aims to understand the speculative tension surrounding the underground space in the two novels and to bring new insights to the scholarship on the rapidly expanding literary canon.
Author Information
Gefan Wang, King’s College London, United Kingdom
Paper Information
Conference: KAMC2024
Stream: Literature
This paper is part of the KAMC2024 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Wang G. (2024) Subterranean Encounters: Speculative Tension and the Underground Space in Takano Fumio’s “Swan Knight” and Nazlı Eray’s “Orpheus” ISSN: 2436-0503 – The Kyoto Conference on Arts, Media & Culture 2024: Official Conference Proceedings (pp. 711-717) https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2436-0503.2024.60
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2436-0503.2024.60
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