Grand Challenges! Great Literature? Topics of the Future and Their Consequences for the Past

Abstract

A changing world has always fed great literature with the dual ambition to thrive on the conflict between old and new worlds while bringing into play all the creativity of literature to frame, redefine, comprehend and criticize with a view to understanding changes in the human condition in its widest sense. Migration, digitalization, climate change and the possible end of humanity as we know it are each in their own way grand challenges to the world. Competing with more media than ever, literature will have to arm itself with expressions that are unique for literature; and fortunately literature's capacity to mix concrete stories and general reflections, to cross time more effortlessly than any other media, and to be rooted in the most distinctive human feature (language) bodes well for this.