Narrating the Future

This article intervenes in the current debates that revolve around the possibility of imagining and narrating utopian projects and alternative futures. Very often these debates culminate in the diagnosis that the future is too complex to be adequately represented in narrative form and that the imagination more generally is in crisis. To move beyond what increasingly seems like an impasse in this theoretical discourse, the author suggests that the inquiry should take into account the heterogeneity of futural visions across the world-literary field by shifting the focus from its core regions to the semi-periphery. Reframing the problem of the future as that of collective action rather than of complexity, the author proposes that the perceived failure of narrative imagination is, in fact, an expression of the generic limits of the novel, limits that are particularly visible on the world-literary semi-periphery. To illustrate these points, the author offers an analysis of Taras Antypovych's Khronos (2011) and discusses how the pervasive concern with the future structurally manifests itself in the contemporary Ukrainian novel as a lack of transformative collective agency

Aesthetics · Art · Cognitive reframing · Epistemology · Futures contract · Futures studies · Literature · Narrative · Social science · Sociology · Transformative learning · Vision · Global Economic and Social Development · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology

• The rise of the novel

  Ian Watt•The rise of the novel•1967

  Incluir item

• The Current of Critical Irrealism

  Michael Löwy•Adventures in Realism•2007

  Incluir item

• Contemporary Fiction vs. the Challenge of Imagining the Timescale of Climate Change

  Michèle Mertens, Mahlu Mertens et al.•Studies in the novel•2018

  Incluir item

• Animal Collectives

  Dominic O’key, O'Key O'Key•Style•2020

  Incluir item

• We-Narrative and the Challenges of Nonhuman Collectives

  Caracciolo Caracciolo•Style•2020

  Incluir item

• Crises of imagination, crises of power

  Max Haiven•Crises of imagination, crises of…•2014

  Incluir item

• The Case for Peripheral Aesthetics

  Auritro Majumder•Interventions•2017

  Incluir item

• The uninhabitable earth

  Open Access•Kate Guy•International Affairs•2019

  Incluir item

• WReC's Reply

  Warwick Research Collective•Comparative Literature Studies•2016

  Incluir item

• The Environmental Tradition in English Literature

  John Parham•Environmental Tradition in…•2017

  Incluir item

• Ian McEwan's Next Novel and the Future of Ecocriticism

  Greg Garrard•Contemporary Literature•2009

  Incluir item

• Contemporary Fiction and Climate Uncertainty

  Open Access•Greg Garrard, Marco Caracciolo et al.•Contemporary Fiction and Climate…•2022

  Incluir item

• Critical utopias

  Bill Ashcroft•Textual Practice•2007

  Incluir item

• World-Economy, World-Ecology, World Literature

  Michael Niblett•Green Letters•2012

  Incluir item

• The Fiction of the Rise of Fictionality

  Monika Fludernik•Poetics Today•2018

  Incluir item