Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T15:24:26.948Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 4 - Diagnostic Dead-Ends

Seeking the Emergent Form

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2023

David Sergeant
Affiliation:
University of Plymouth
Get access

Summary

If the domestic near future operates with residual and dominant cultural forms, in Raymond Williams’s terms, it also provides glimpses of potential emergent formations. This chapter reads two novels that give a particularly vivid sense of the incipient genre of near-future revolution struggling within inherited genres that can register but not properly embody it. While the eponymous company in The Circle by Dave Eggers (2013) provides a more legible delineation of the Anthropocene than the environmental disasters that often populate the domestic near future, its victory relies on a similar investment in individual embodiment, that has as its correlate a latent antipathy to collective agency – such as might coalesce in the prospective revolution glimpsed at the novel’s close. Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich (2013) progresses from a devastating satire of apocalyptic capitalism into an oscillation between shattered human communities and a dangerous journeying: between capitalist realism in the shadow of dystopia and the adventure romance. However, almost despite itself, the novel dowses at its end towards another kind of collective that would also be another form of novel.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Near Future in Twenty-First-Century Fiction
Climate, Retreat and Revolution
, pp. 82 - 97
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Diagnostic Dead-Ends
  • David Sergeant, University of Plymouth
  • Book: The Near Future in Twenty-First-Century Fiction
  • Online publication: 07 August 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009279901.005
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Diagnostic Dead-Ends
  • David Sergeant, University of Plymouth
  • Book: The Near Future in Twenty-First-Century Fiction
  • Online publication: 07 August 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009279901.005
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Diagnostic Dead-Ends
  • David Sergeant, University of Plymouth
  • Book: The Near Future in Twenty-First-Century Fiction
  • Online publication: 07 August 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009279901.005
Available formats
×