Temporality and Trauma in American Sci-Fi Television

Network Fictions and the Global Unhomely

“…is always something that occurs -the expression tells us a lot about its relation to the tuché -as if by chance ' (1973: 54; original emphasis). The accident is a recurring motif in these fictions, not only in the sense of a major event that determines and organises the overarching narratives of these fictions -such as the crash of Flight 815 on Lost or 9/11 in Pattern Recognition, which has left Cayce with a post-traumatic symptom that makes her oversensitive to corporate brand logos, something that makes her a good coolhunter (see Mousoutzanis 2014). Furthermore, the accident is pertinent in these fictions in the sense of the random, the unpredictable and the unexpected -as in the case of Ghostwritten, which is repeatedly preoccupied with the ways in which chance encounters and events affect other people's lives, how individual lives are 'ghostwritten' by other people.…”