Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-03T19:22:24.372Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Taking the Future into Account: Today's Novels for Tomorrow's Readers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Michaela Bronstein
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The idea of writing for the future often seems like a selfish act: a claim for personal immortality. Yet writing with future readers in mind also requires imagining the needs of a world radically different from our own. This paper examines Future Library, an artwork in which authors contribute writing that will not be read until 2114, and the fiction of David Mitchell, one of the contributing authors. In these works, writing for the future is political, not because it represents the future but because it simultaneously demands intervention in the present and opens itself to the new and to unexpected future uses.

Type
Special Topic: Cultures of Reading
Information
PMLA , Volume 134 , Issue 1: Special Topic Cultures of Reading , January 2019 , pp. 121 - 136
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Anderson, Jill E. “‘Warm Blood and Live Semen and Rich Marrow and Wholesome Flesh!‘: A Queer Ecological Reading of Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man”. Journal of Ecocriticism, vol. 3, no. 1, Jan. 2011, pp. 51–66.Google Scholar
Atwood, Margaret. “Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet.” Martin, pp. 191–93.Google Scholar
Baucom, Ian. “‘Moving Centers’: Climate Change, Critical Method, and the Historical Novel”. Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 76, no. 2, June 2015, pp. 137–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Best, Stephen, and Marcus, Sharon. “Surface Reading: An Introduction”. Representations, vol. 108, no. 1, Fall 2009, pp. 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butler, Octavia. Parable of the Talents. Seven Stories, 1998. Canavan, Gerry, and Kim Stanley Robinson, editors. Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction. Wesleyan UP, 2014.Google Scholar
Chun, Chun Wendy Hui. “On Hypo-Real Models or Global Climate Change: A Challenge for the Humanities”. Critical Inquiry, vol. 41, Spring 2015, pp. 675–703.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Conrad, Joseph. “Henry James: An Appreciation”. Notes on Life and Letters, edited by Stape, J.H., Cambridge UP, 2004, pp. 15–20.Google Scholar
D'Amato, Anthony. International Law Studies. Kluwer Law International, 1997. Vol. 2 of Collected Papers.Google Scholar
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke UP, 2004.Google Scholar
Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. U of Chicago P, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trust, Future Library. “Announcing Sjón as Future Library's Third Author”. Facebook, 13 Oct. 2016, www.facebook.com/Futurelibrary.no/posts/announcing-sj%C3%B3n-as-future-librarys-third-author-the-celebrated-icelandic-poet-no/646838722156636/.Google Scholar
Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement. U of Chicago P, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Halberstam, Jack (published under Judith). Te Queer Art of Failure. Duke UP, 2011.Google Scholar
Hayot, Eric. “Of Clouds and Clocks: The Fiction of David Mitchell”. Public Books, 1 Feb. 2015, www.publicbooks.org/of-clouds-and-clocksthe-fiction-of-david-mitchell/.Google Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. The Antinomies of Realism. Verso, 2015.Google Scholar
Kingston, Maxine Hong. “‘I Can Write My Shadow’: Alexis Cheung Interviews Maxine Hong Kingston”. Los Angeles Review of Books, 22 Sept. 2016, lareviewoftooks.org/article/can-write-shadow-alexis-cheung-interviews-maxine-hong-kingston/.Google Scholar
Knapp, Steven, and Michaels, Walter Benn. “Against Theory”. Critical Inquiry, vol. 8, no. 4, Summer 1982, pp. 723–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martin, Mark, editor. I'm with the Bears. Verso, 2011.Google Scholar
Marvell, Andrew. “Rehearsal Transpros'd”. The Prose Works, vol. 1, edited by Martin Dzelzainis and Annabel Patterson, Yale UP, 2003, pp. 41–203.Google Scholar
Mayer, Sylvia, and von Mossner, Alexa Weik, editors. The Anticipation of Catastrophe: Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture. Universitätsverlag Winter, 2014.Google Scholar
McKibben, Bill. Introduction. Martin, pp. 1–5.Google Scholar
Mehnert, Antonia. Climate Change Fictions: Representations of Global Warming in American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Milton, John. Areopagitica. Complete Prose Works, vol. 2, edited by Ernest Sirluck, Yale UP, 1959, pp. 480–570.Google Scholar
Mitchell, David. “he Ayes Have It.” Future Library, www.futurelibrary.no/assets/press/essays/David_Mitchell.pdf. Accessed 5 Nov. 2018.Google Scholar
Mitchell, David. The Bone Clocks. Random House, 2014.Google Scholar
Mitchell, David. Cloud Atlas. Random House, 2004.Google Scholar
Mitchell, David. Slade House. Random House, 2015.Google Scholar
Munoz, José. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York UP, 2009.Google Scholar
Ng, Lynda. “Cannibalism, Colonialism and Apocalypse in Mitchell's Global Future”. Substance, vol. 44, no. 1, 2015, pp. 107–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard UP, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nussbaum, Martha C. Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford UP, 1990.Google Scholar
Paterson, Katie. “The Artwork.” Future Library, www.futurelibrary.no/#/the-artwork.Google Scholar
Paterson, Katie. Interview. By Michaela Bronstein. 27 Oct. 2016.Google Scholar
Paterson, Katie. Introductory video. Future Library, www.katiepaterson.org/futurelibrary/. Accessed 10 Oct. 2015.Google Scholar
Phillips, Dana. The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America. Oxford UP, 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rancière, Jacques. Aesthetics and Its Discontents. translated by Corcoran, Steven, Polity Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling. Duke UP, 2002.Google Scholar
Shakespeare, William. Sonnet 11. Shakespeare's Sonnets, edited by Duncan-Jones, Katherine, Arden Shakespeare, 1997, p. 133.Google Scholar
Trexler, Adam. Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. U of Virginia P, 2015.Google Scholar
Twain, Mark. The Autobiography of Mark Twain. vol. 1. U of California P, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walkowitz, Rebecca. “English as a Foreign Language: David Mitchell and the Born-Translated Novel”. SubStance, vol. 44, no. 2, 2015, pp. 30–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Warner, Michael. “Uncritical Reading”. Polemic: Critical or Uncritical, edited by Gallop, Jane, Routledge, 2004, pp. 13–38.Google Scholar
Washburn, Anne. Mr Burns: A Post-electric Play. Oberon Books, 2014.Google Scholar
Weiss, Edith Brown. “In Fairness to Future Generations and Sustainable Development”. American University International Law Review, vol. 8, no. 1, 1992, pp. 19–26.Google Scholar
Williams, R. John. “World Futures.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 42, Spring 2016, pp. 473–546.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wood, James. “Soul Cycle”. The New Yorker, 8 Sept. 2014, pp. 78–82.Google Scholar