Narrating the Future: A World-Literary Take on the Crisis of Imagination and the Novel

Abstract

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.