The Cold War caused a spatial distress that profoundly shaped the Western imagination: the beginning of the Space Age coincided, as a matter of fact, with the global spread of a subterranean, post-apocalyptic imagination of the bunker. This topological relationship between looking up, towards the sky, and looking down, beneath the ground, created a »bipolar« view of the Earth’s surface. As I argue in this project, this distress should be understood as a sort of tension between a claustrophilic and a claustrophobic relation to space. This tension can be profitably illustrated by focusing on the cartographic imagination of European and American science fiction of that period. Drawing on David Seed and Fredric Jameson, among others, I will examine literary texts, films, and TV shows produced and published roughly between the launch of Sputnik (1957) and the Apollo 11 mission (1969), exploring how they mapped, re-spaced, and translated the geographical anxieties out of which they were born.

Federico Italiano is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Culture Studies and Theatre History at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and Privatdozent at the Institute of General and Comparative Literature Studies at the LMU Munich. He teaches at the Universities of Vienna and Innsbruck and has twice been visiting professor at the University of Graz. He is also a poet and translator.