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Chapter 4 - Diagnostic Dead-Ends

Seeking the Emergent Form

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2023

David Sergeant
Affiliation:
University of Plymouth
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Summary

If the domestic near future operates with residual and dominant cultural forms, in Raymond Williams’s terms, it also provides glimpses of potential emergent formations. This chapter reads two novels that give a particularly vivid sense of the incipient genre of near-future revolution struggling within inherited genres that can register but not properly embody it. While the eponymous company in The Circle by Dave Eggers (2013) provides a more legible delineation of the Anthropocene than the environmental disasters that often populate the domestic near future, its victory relies on a similar investment in individual embodiment, that has as its correlate a latent antipathy to collective agency – such as might coalesce in the prospective revolution glimpsed at the novel’s close. Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich (2013) progresses from a devastating satire of apocalyptic capitalism into an oscillation between shattered human communities and a dangerous journeying: between capitalist realism in the shadow of dystopia and the adventure romance. However, almost despite itself, the novel dowses at its end towards another kind of collective that would also be another form of novel.

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The Near Future in Twenty-First-Century Fiction
Climate, Retreat and Revolution
, pp. 82 - 97
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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  • Diagnostic Dead-Ends
  • David Sergeant, University of Plymouth
  • Book: The Near Future in Twenty-First-Century Fiction
  • Online publication: 07 August 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009279901.005
Available formats
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To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Diagnostic Dead-Ends
  • David Sergeant, University of Plymouth
  • Book: The Near Future in Twenty-First-Century Fiction
  • Online publication: 07 August 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009279901.005
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Diagnostic Dead-Ends
  • David Sergeant, University of Plymouth
  • Book: The Near Future in Twenty-First-Century Fiction
  • Online publication: 07 August 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009279901.005
Available formats
×