This course will introduce basic narratological concepts, applicable in principle to all literary texts, by considering the special case of time travel stories.  A primer in popular genre fiction, the course aims to grapple with the relationship between the philosophy of time and imaginative literature in light of two cardinal developments in twentieth century thought:  (1) The so-called ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy, which slowly gave rise to the dedicated study of the logic, principles and practices of narrative representation, in what Tzvetan Todorov termed ‘Narratology’ (1969).  (2) The revolution in physics and popular culture inaugurated almost exactly one hundred years ago when Albert Einstein completed the final version of his General Theory of Relativity and published a book about both Special and General theories for a popular audience, transforming the formal and thematic possibilities of narrative literature as surely as his theories transformed Newtonian physics.