Futurity

This book explores how deconstruction addresses the issue of futurity in the act of writing and translation. It focuses on three French expressions - venue, survenue, and voir-venir - taken from the work of Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Catherine Malabou, and offers fresh insights, proposing the possibility of a multiplicity of structures.

From Husserl's account of protention to the recent turn to eschatology in "theological" phenomenology, the future has always been a key aspect of phenomenological theories of time. This book offers the first sustained reflection on the significance of futurity for the phenomenological method itself. In tracing the development of this theme, the author shows that only a proper understanding of the two-fold nature of the future (as constitution and as openness) can clarify the way in which phenomenology brings the subject and the world together. Futurity therefore points us to the centrality of the promise for phenomenology, recasting phenomenology as a promissory discipline.Clearly written and carefully argued, this book provides fresh insight into the phenomenological provenance of the "theological" turn and the phenomenological conclusions of Husserl, Levinas, and Derrida. Closely examining the themes of protention, eschatology, and the messianic, it will be essential reading for anyone interested in phenomenology, philosophy of religion, deconstruction, or philosophical theology.

When looking at how trauma is represented in literature and the arts, we tend to focus on the weight of the past. In this book, Amir Eshel suggests that this retrospective gaze has trapped us in a search for reason in the madness of the twentieth century’s catastrophes at the expense of literature’s prospective vision. Considering several key literary works, Eshel argues in Futurity that by grappling with watershed events of modernity, these works display a future-centric engagement with the past that opens up the present to new political, cultural, and ethical possibilities—what he calls futurity. Bringing together postwar German, Israeli, and Anglo-American literature, Eshel traces a shared trajectory of futurity in world literature. He begins by examining German works of fiction and the debates they spurred over the future character of Germany’s public sphere. Turning to literary works by Jewish-Israeli writers as they revisit Israel’s political birth, he shows how these stories inspired a powerful reconsideration of Israel’s identity. Eshel then discusses post-1989 literature—from Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs to J. M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year—revealing how these books turn to events like World War II and the Iraq War not simply to make sense of the past but to contemplate the political and intellectual horizon that emerged after 1989. Bringing to light how reflections on the past create tools for the future, Futurity reminds us of the numerous possibilities literature holds for grappling with the challenges of both today and tomorrow.

Gender Futurity, Intersectional Autoethnography showcases a collection of narrative and autoethnographic research that unpacks the complexity of gender at its intersections, i.e. by ability, race, sexuality, religion, beauty, geography, spatiality, community, performance, politics, socio-economic status, education, and many other markers of difference. The book focuses on gender as it is lived, chaperoned, and chaperones other social identity categories. It tells stories that reveal problematic gender binaries, promising gender futures, and everything in between—they ask us to rethink what we assume to be true, real, and normal about gender identity and expression. Each essay, written by both gender variant and cisgender scholars, explores cultural phenomena that create space for us to re-imagine, re-think, and create new ways of being. This book will be useful for undergraduate, postgraduate, and professional degree students, particularly in the fields of gender studies, qualitative methods, and communication theory.

This interdisciplinary academic study is for readers interested in film, media, and the comic book genre. Superhero theories are abundant, especially considering their use as a tool for coping with adversity, and some note that it is an integral part of American society, young formative minds, in particular. It is not just about learning morals but also seeing how an ideal society should function and look. There are works that review superheroes and theories about comic book series adaptions in film and text, but the writers in this compendium engage not only with the film and the intersectionality of women, Asian culture, Du Bois, and even Greek Ajax and others for comparison but also comparative analysis of works that capture African and African diasporic representation throughout various historical time periods. The anthology presents discourse that engages a variety of assessments that involve questions of positive and pejorative representation. Educators will find this a useful tool for undergraduate students as well as general audiences interested in this popular film/comic series.

Heroic Girls looks at the recent proliferation of young girl heroes in many recent mainstream films and books. These contemporary ‘final’ girls do not just survive but rather suggest that in doing so they have fundamentally changed something about themselves and or the world around them, seeing them become the ‘First Girls’ of this altered reality. The collection brings together a wide range of perspectives and cultural viewpoints that describe many recent narratives that explore the idea of a Final Girl and her “after-story”. The essays are divided into four sections, beginning with more theoretical approaches; cross-cultural examples; the ways in which fictional narratives bear strong relation to real-world circumstances; examples that more strongly depict themes of resistance, survival, and individual agency; and, finally, those that describe something more fundamental and transformative. Films and television shows covered in the collection include The Girl with All the Gifts, The Witcher, The Hunger Games, Star Wars, The Fear Street and Pan’s Labyrinth. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of film studies, gender studies, and media studies.

This collection of essays asks contributors to take the capaciousness of the word "queer" to heart in order to think about what medieval queers would have looked like and how they may have existed on the margins and borders of dominant, normative sexuality and desire. The contributors work with recent trends in queer medieval studies, blending together modern concepts of sexuality and desire with the queer configurations of eroticism, desire, and materiality as they might have existed for medieval audiences.

At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Renaissance Futurities considers the intersections between artistic rebirth, the new science, and European imperialism in the global early modern world. Charlene Villaseñor Black and Mari-Tere Álvarez take as inspiration the work of Renaissance genius Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), prolific artist and inventor, and other polymaths such as philosopher Giulio “Delminio” Camillo (1480–1544), physician and naturalist Francisco Hernández de Toledo (1514–1587), and writer Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616). This concern with futurity is inspired by the Renaissance itself, a period defined by visions of the future, as well as by recent theorizing of temporality in Renaissance and Queer Studies. This transdisciplinary volume is at the cutting edge of the humanities, medical humanities, scientific discovery, and avant-garde artistic expression.