College Literature

They even think that they have spent such days well,in a truly useful and worthy manner, these days spentin contemplation of the possible forms of the future….They are calm and unworried enough to set out with theauthor on a long road whose endpoint only a much latergeneration will see. When the greatly agitated reader, incontrast, springs into action … we must fear he has failedto understand the author.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Anti-Education: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions

It is not particularly controversial to suggest that the study of literature is an invaluable endeavor due to the insights literary studies provide. Likewise, it is easy to hinge a case for the importance of literary studies on the notion of hindsight—this is why literary studies are often informed by, and expand, our sense of history. Alternatively, some literary studies aspire for omnividence. If omnividence is possible, the result of such strong theorization would be oversight, transtemporal truths unaffected by the flows of time. [End Page 435]

The aim of this special section is to add a third temporal dimension to our vision of the epistemological breadth of literary studies: foresight. If literature can be "foresightful"—if, in other words, literature invites readers to both imagine and reimagine what might come to be—then perhaps literary studies should start asking, in the future tense, questions such as these: how do the cultural signs we see today help us re-envision what might come tomorrow? What will readers ten years from now make of this novel? How does a given poem expand our sense of the parameters of the possible? Which metaphors does a given world leader employ to narrate their vision of intergenerational justice, and how do often tacit flashes of immanent futurity foreclose the imagining of one set of futures and forebode the legislation of another?

Or, to re-introduce the central concern of this special section with a bit of an antagonistic spin: it is not particularly controversial to suggest that some literary studies decrease in value because they lack insight. Let's call such studies "apresentist." The visions provided by apresentist scholarship are not in tune with the scholarly times, they don't resonate with the intellectual needs of the present. Just as a study can suffer from presentism, or a myopic imposition of the cognitive biases of the present, so too can a study slide down the presentist spectrum into apresentism, or myopia, regarding the cognitive bases of contemporary scholarship. Likewise, the value of a literary study can be attenuated by a deficit of hindsight. We call these studies "ahistorical," and the charge we level against them is that a failure to sufficiently situate an object of inquiry in its historical moment has produced a distorted vision of the object in question. I will not belabor this point, because we all, more or less, agree on the intellectual dangers of ahistorical reading. Mark McGurl once called our overwhelming scholarly consensus on this point "the hegemony of history" in literary studies (2010, 322).

The aim of this special section is to further the democratization of the temporalities of literary studies, to propose foresight as an epistemological contribution of literary studies just as worthy of scholarly enfranchisement as insight, hindsight, and theoretical oversight. The mission-statement desires of literary studies—critical and creative thinking, imaginative empathy, hermeneutic honesty, and so on—are just as dependent on forward-thinking as they are on its historical counterpart. Given this dependence, the degree of forethoughtfulness of a work of literary studies is often a constitutive determinant of our assessment of its thoughtfulness. My [End Page 436] thinking here is simply a recapitulation of Helen Small's claim in The Value of the Humanities: "the work of the humanities is frequently … imaginative, or provocative, or speculative" (2014, 26).

In other words, the papers collected for this special section do not make a case against historicist reading. (In fact, the papers suppose that one cannot imagine possible futures—or at least one cannot imagine them well—without simultaneously rethinking pasts and presents.) Rather, each contribution makes a case against afuturisitic reading...