Språkvetenskapliga fakulteten, LILAe

Kalendarium

At the turn of the nineteenth century and until second World War, representations of the future are presented in novels, in the press, in caricatures, in such proportions that this appears as a viral mediatic phenomenon. How does this social imagery aggregate to form a literary genre? Is Anticipation a paradigm for contemporary authors to understand modernity? In this talk, I will analyze how a literary genre is constructed, and the possible discrepancy between what the public comments at the time, and what the historian of literature reconstructs, through his a posteriori posture. I will start with a brief survey of the different possible definitions of Anticipation literature. Then I will develop three themes that give access to prominent aspects of Anticipation literature : its relationship with Time and the status of Future in Anticipation, the importance of Science in the novels, and finally the visual dimension of the genre.