Johannes Riquet is Senior Teaching and Research Associate in English Literature at the University of Zurich. In 2014, he completed his PhD thesis on the aesthetics of island space. He is currently working on a new book on the railway journey in British fiction and a project on contemporary representations of the Arctic alongside his continued interest in islands. He is one of the founding members of the international research group Island Poetics. Johannes Riquet’s research interests include islands, spatiality, the links between literature and geography, phenomenology, deconstruction, representations of magic, cinema, and railway journeys in literature and the arts. He collaborates with various research groups at other universities, such as the "Border Poetics" group at the University of Tromsø and the research cluster “The Spaces of Language and Literature” at the University of Tampere (Finland).

Trains, Interrupted: British Railroad Fiction and the Accidents of Modernity

Trains, Interrupted is a comprehensive study of the complex intersections of aesthetic experience and the project of modernity in British representations of the railroad from 1830-1939. It offers a cultural history of the railway journey in literature, cinema and the visual arts as a specifically modern experience of multiple accidents, interruptions and interferences. Starting with a discussion of early railroad fiction (like Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son and “The Signalman”), it also discusses modernist engagements with the train (such as Virginia Woolf’s “An Unwritten Novel” and Dorothy Richardson’s “Journey to Paradise”), and addresses the importance of trains in early twentieth-century crime fiction (e.g. Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express and Ethel Lina White’s The Wheel Spins) and cinema (e.g. Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes).

Island Poetics

Island Poetics is an international research project devoted to the study of the spatial imagination of islands in literature, cinema and other media (such as computer games). We are interested in tracing the textual construction of islands in literary texts, films and other media by focusing on moments in those texts where the spatial conception of an island is established, changed or challenged. The project is led by five young researchers from Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Tasmania, and Germany. We are currently in the process of putting together a co-authored volume on the spatial poetics of islands. We also regurlarly present joint panels at conferences on islands and spatiality, and are planning an international Island Poetics conference for 2017.

Arctic Passages and Transnational Geopolitics

This project responds to the increasing interest in Arctic spaces in recent fiction as well as in scientific, environmental and geopolitical discourses. It aims to connect contemporary global anxieties, fantasies and concerns projected onto the high north with a long history of imaginative investment in the Arctic as a both enabling and threatening transnational zone. It thus attempts to show how older discourses – like those surrounding the search for the Northwest Passage or the paranoid Cold War scenarios of an Arctic war – are both reinscribed and reinvented in contemporary accounts.

The Aesthetics of Island Space: Perception, Ideology, Geopoetics (completed)

In my doctoral dissertation, which I am currently preparing for publication, I examine the spatial poetics of islands in literary texts (from Shakespeare's The Tempest to Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide), journals of explorers and scientists (like James Cook and Charles Darwin), and Hollywood cinema (e.g. King Kong). I discuss islands as crucial figures in the modern experience of space as negotiated by Anglo-American texts and films. Arguing against standard accounts of literary islands as tropes for enclosed, autonomous and static spaces, I trace the ways in which literary islands have functioned as malleable spatial figures of geological instability and poetic production, and have offered vivid perceptual experiences and a geopoetic oscillation between the material energies of words and images and the energies of the physical world.

2017 (in preparation). The Aesthetics of Island Space: Perception, Ideology, Geopoetics. 

2017 (in preparation). “Eye-Land on the Horizon: Eroding the Image and the Island Paradise in White Shadows of the South Seas (1928).” Spatial Modernities: Geography, Narrative, Imaginaries. Ed. Johannes Riquet and Elizabeth Kollmann. 

2017 (in preparation). Spatial Modernities: Geography, Narrative, Imaginaries. Ed. Johannes Riquet and Elizabeth Kollmann.

2017 (forthcoming)."Islands." Travel Writing: 100 Keywords. Ed. Charles Forsdick, Zoe Kinsley and Kathryn Walchester. London: Anthem.

2017 (forthcoming). "Reading Across the Gutter: Tintin's Interrupted Railway Journeys." Dimensions of Iconicity. Ed. Matthias Bauer, Christina Ljungberg and Angelika Zirker. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

2017. “Island Spatialities.” The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space. Ed. Robert T. Tally Jr. London: Routledge.

2016. “Spectral Island Topographies: Negotiating Relations between East and West in Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) and Skyfall (2012).” Topographies of Popular Culture. Ed. Markku Salmela and Maarit Piipponen. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 115-136. 

2016. Review of Mondes clos: les îles, ed. Daniel Barbu, Nicolas Meylan and Youri Volokine. Island Studies Journal 11:1, 332-34. 

2016. "Islands Erased by Snow and Ice: Approaching the Spatial Philosophy of Cold-Water Island Fictions." Island Studies Journal 11:1, 145-160. 

2016. “Islands as Shifting Territories: Evolution, Geology and the Island Poetics of Darwin, Wallace, Wells and Ghosh.” Insularity: Representations of Small Worlds. Ed. Kathrin Schödel und Kathrin Dautel. Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann.

2014. “Killing King Kong: The Camera at the Borders of the Tropical Island, 1767-1937.” Nordlit 31, 133-49. 2014.

2014. “Bliss and War on the Island: Undoing Myth and Negotiating History in Treasure Island and The Beach.” Navigating Cultural Spaces: Maritime Places. Ed. Anna-Margaretha Horatschek et al. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 177-91.

2012. “‘How Shall We Find the Concord of this Discord?’ Music, Magic and Ideology in A Midsummer Night's Dream.” Variations 20, 77-91.

2010. “Gefangen in der Freiheit: Die Falle der utopischen Insel.” Zoon Politikon 8, 49-53.

2 December 2016. "Not So Silent Snow: Towards a Transnational Arctic Ecopoetics." Paper at the ENSCAN workshop "Nordic Narratives of the Environment" at Mid Sweden University (Sundsvall). 

25 November 2016. "Into the Railway Cutting: Geology, Deep Time and the Accidents of Modernity in Dickens's 'The Signal-Man'." Paper at the conference "Shifting Grounds: Literature, Culture and Spatial Phenomenologies" at the University of Zurich. 

21 November 2016. "Cinema, Geopolitics and Arctic Landscapes: The Cold Cold War in Orions Belte." Paper at the conference "Arctic Cinema" at the University of Trondheim (Norway). 

25 July 2016. "Beyond Island Conception: Questioning Islandness Through Fiction." Paper and co-organisation of an Island Poetics panel at the special section "Island Fictions and Metaphors" at the 21st World Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association in Vienna (Austria). 

19 November 2015. "Geomorpholoy, Geocriticism, Geopoetics? Towards a Theory of Literary Sedimentation." Paper at the Conference "Humanities: Humanities and the Cartographic Turn" at the University of Extremadura (Spain). 

4 September 2015. " Writing Islands in the Anthropocene: Literature, Cultural Geography, and the De(con)struction of Islands." With Daniel Graziadei. Paper at the International Conference of the Royal Geographic Society at the University of Exeter (UK). 

27 June 2015. "Vertical Sediments, Horizontal Movements: Approaching the Spatial Philosophy of Cold-Water Island Fictions." Paper at the international RETI conference in Orkney (UK).

26 March 2015. "'En train d'écrire': Jacques Derrida, Michel Serres and Tintin's Interrupted Railway Journeys." Paper at the Tenth International Symposium on Iconicity in Language and Literature at the University of Tübingen (Germany).

31 January 2015. "Islands as (Floating) Images: Theorising Island Poetics." Paper at the international Symposium Images of Identity at the University of Zurich.

24 September 2014. “Island Poetics: The Project.” With Daniel Graziadei and Britta Hartmann. Paper at the 13th international ISISA Islands of the World Conference at the University of Penghu (Taiwan).

24 September 2014. “Caught between Water and Land: The Politics and Poetics of Angel Island.” Paper at the 13th international ISISA Islands of the World conference at the University of Penghu (Taiwan).

6 June 2014. “Islands in Four Dimensions: Radical Theories of Space and the Ecological Island Poetics of Pacific Northwest Writing.” International conference “Between Spaces and Places: Landscapes of Liminality” at Trinity College Dublin.

29 November 2013. “Eye-Land on the Horizon: Eroding the Image and the Island Paradise in White Shadows of the South Seas (1928).” Paper at the international conference "Travelling Narratives: Modernity and the Spatial Imaginary” at the University of Zurich.

23 November 2013. “The Island as Territory: Darwin’s Legacy in Island Myths from H. G. Wells to Amitav Ghosh." Paper at the international conference "Insularity. Representations and Constructions of Small Worlds" at the University of Malta.

26 October 2013. “Spectral Island Topographies: Negotiating Relations between East and West in Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) and Skyfall (2012).” Conference paper at the international conference "Topographies of Popular Culture” at the University of Tampere (Finland).

26 September 2013. “Navigation into Paradise: Cecil B. DeMille’s Male and Female, Ellis Island and the American Insular Imaginary.” Paper at the international ENCLS conference, "Islands and Continents: (Re)construtions of Identity" at the University of Madeira.

17 May 2013. "Flooded by History: Accumulating the Past on the Shores of the Island." Paper at the international Island Dynamics conference at Eastern Mediterrenean University (Cyprus).

6 September 2012. “Killing King Kong: The Camera at the Borders of the South Sea Island.” Paper at the international Border Aesthetics conference at the University of Tromsø (Norway).

10 September 2011. “Island Monsters and Uncanny Doubles: Tracing Darwin's Unsettling Legacy in Jurassic Park.” Paper at the conference Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil at Mansfield College (Oxford).

1 October 2010. “Bliss and War on the Island: Undoing Myth and Negotiating History in Treasure Island and The Beach.” Paper at the international symposium Navigating Cultural Spaces: Images of Coast and Sea at the University of Kiel.

28 June 2016. "Ambiguous Archipelagoes: Literature, Island Studies and the Archipelagic Turn." Invited talk at the 2016 Conference of the Antarctic Archipelagoes Research Consortium in Falmouth (UK). 

9 April 2015. (Re)reading Islands: Utopia, Piracy, and the Poetics of Island Space. Guest lecture at the University of Tromsø (Norway).

8 April 2015. Bordering on Infinity: Islands, Trains, and the Geopoetics of Space. Guest lecture at the University of Tromsø (Norway).

7 April 2015. Multimedial Islands from Tahiti to Pitcairn: Visions of the Pacific, 1767-2015. Guest lecture at the University of Tromsø (Norway).

22 January 2015. "Theorising Island Poetics." With Daniel Graziadei. Talk at the symposium January Blues? Escape to a desert island! at the University of Essex.

5 August 2014. “Am Ende die Insel.” Podium at the Zurich Filmpodium, with Daniel Graziadei, Britta Hartmann and Michel Bodmer.

25 April 2012. “The Island as Crime Scene: Investigations of Murder and Self in Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None and Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island.” Presentation in the interdisciplinary graduate seminar at the University of Tampere (Finland).

15 March 2012. “Exploding Eden: The Instability of Utopian Islands in World War II films.” Presentation in the interdisciplinary research group Kielen ja kirjallisuuden tilola (The spaces of language and literature) at the University of Tampere (Finland).

14 February 2012. “The Space of Islands.” Guest lecture in the MA option course “Literary Landscapes” (taught by Markku Salmela) at the English department of the University of Tampere (Finland).