The Speculative Present: The Conceptual Work of Pasts and Futures in Postmodernity
Open Access
- Author:
- Haley, Adam Dunnington
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- July 27, 2012
- Committee Members:
- Michael Francis Berube, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Michael Francis Berube, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Jeffrey Nealon, Committee Member
Brian Lennon, Committee Member
Eric Robert Hayot, Committee Member - Keywords:
- contemporary American fiction
speculative fiction
science fiction
history
historical fiction
apocalypse - Abstract:
- Mindful of the depth of the task of capturing in fiction the totality of structural interconnectedness at the end of the 20th century and the start of the 21st, one might wonder how to produce a satisfying account of a world that seems mimetically unrepresentable. Following the Kantian insight that the aesthetic is what awakens us to form, I argue that fictional discourse as such acts as a powerful access point for thinking structure, however incomplete the content of its representations—"realism" of a certain sort, in other words, is to be found in form rather than content. Jean-Luc Nancy suggests that there is a homology between the structural characteristics of worlds and of works of art, that "a world perhaps always, at least potentially, shares the unity proper to the work of art." As such, the way fictional narratives simultaneously imply and produce fictional worlds larger than themselves is homologous to the way our day-to-day experience simultaneously implies and produces the totality of the real world, which is to say in some way, ontology is a fundamentally aesthetic operation. Contrary to continued assertions over the last two decades that cultural production broadly and the novel in particular have lost their relevance in a world of systems and commodities in endless, dizzying circulation, I argue that fictional discourse of particular kinds, through the connections between form, narrative, worldness, and structure, allows us to start thinking the questions about the contemporary that otherwise seem insurmountably daunting. Given the continued prominence of historical and future-speculative fictions on the marketplace and the theater marquees, given their increasing but under-remarked permeation into the literary mainstream, and given the apparent difficulty of the contemporary confronting its own structure head-on, I take as my corpus an array of speculative fictions—past-oriented and future-oriented, popular and literary, prose and televisual, realist and otherwise—that seem in some way to comment on the contemporary moment of their production by way of narrating and world-making in other times. In particular, The Speculative Present asks what contemporary culture's apparently frequent desire to colonize, analogize, and allegorize other temporal moments tells us about the contemporary, about the kinds of structure to which it is attuned, and about the possibilities and limits of its structural imagination. What structural realities or connections, that is, are made visible by these narrative journeys to past and future? If there is an active strain of contemporary cultural production that seems to have a sort of negative theology of itself—a version of the contemporary fitting a Saussurean model of "a system of differences with no positive terms," defining itself against and alongside other moments that seem simultaneously more speculative (reassembling the past, projecting the future) and more solidly comprehensible—then what is produced conceptually if we take this negative theology seriously? Insofar as something roughly describable as postmodernism has been arguably the cultural dominant of the last half century, the contemporary often seems to characterize itself in these kinds of negative terminologies: the literature of exhaustion, the end of history, the death of sincerity, post- this, the loss of that. To whatever extent a broad cross-section of the contemporary theorizes itself in these ways—as an endlessly significant transitional moment, as always an ending and thus implicitly also a beginning—I argue that these genres, far from being on the periphery of contemporary culture, are at its very heart.