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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Michaela Bronstein
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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

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