The aesthetics of futurity: Literature, media, time

"Live in the future," writes English-born poet Mina Loy in a manifesto published in the avant-garde magazine Camera Work in 1914. The Aesthetics of Futurity: Literature, Media, Time gives a cultural history of the incitement to inhabit the future from the late 19th century to the present in global Anglophone literature and culture. Not simply predicting or imagining the future, futurity involves the array of practices and techniques for managing the future including foresight, speculation, monumentality and flow. The project charts how the concept of the future changed across cultural and aesthetic fields through readings of works from Aestheticism to Futurism, from high literary modernism to contemporary postcolonial literature. While the unpredictability of global real-time came to be managed through the apparatuses of the risk society and neoliberal globalization, this project unpacks the temporality and aesthetics of culture in real-time from the origins of modernism to the emergence of the postcolonial novel.