No Future (I)

The essays gathered in this and the next issue of Poetics Today (vol. 37, no. 3) approach the concept of No Future from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, drawing on a range of materials to explore literary, philosophical, aesthetic, political, and ideological dimensions of futurity’s negation. The essays in the current issue proceed from broadly theoretical perspectives, while the essays in the following issue shift the focus to explicit consideration of No Future’s themes and tropes in specific literary contexts. Taken together, they dramatize the dynamic contingency of a (No) Future suspended between problematic necessity and practical impossibility.