Narrating Future

Narrating future

KUL-13471 Seminar (Präsenzveranstaltung)

6/9 ECTS

Veranstaltungsbeginn: 20.04.2023 Do, 11 - 13 Uhr Ort: GD 201 

Future narratives are as old as narrating itself. We use forms of the future in describing our own idea of life paths, in the planning of events, festivities, journeys etc. By developing scenarios, we create images that help us to put an idea into practice, for example by talking through time sequences and causalities. From these future narratives, possible obstacles can be derived and overcome in advance. Future narratives occur in our everyday lives, in politics, economics, advertising, and not least in literature. Dystopias and utopias present us with our world in the future. We encounter the future as a literary subject in numerous stories from George Orwell to Jules Verne to Stanislaw Lem. Theoretically, the future can already be found in basic concepts such as grammatical tenses as well as in Gerard Genette's narrative theory. In this course we want to take a closer look at the language-based construction of the future on the one hand, and on the other hand we want to find out which images of the future are created in narratives in terms of content. We want to know what distinguishes the future from the present, which elements in the narrated futures are changed and which remain the same.

Literature: Bode, Christoph and Dietrich, Rainer. Future Narratives: Theory, Poetics, and Media-Historical Moment, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2013. Chermack, Thomas J., Susan A. Lynham, and Wendy EA Ruona. "A review of scenario planning literature." Futures research quarterly 17.2 (2001): 7-32.

Performance: Weekly reading and active participation, presentation, Hausarbeit

Language: English

More information about the course can be found on Moodle.