Reorienting critical theory and literary criticism to consider how the present contains seeds of a future beyond capitalism

Critical theorists have long held to the axiom that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Greg Forter starts this wide-ranging study of contemporary literature by suggesting that this position is increasingly hard to maintain. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the global rise of the New Right, and the mass disruptions and despair wrought by COVID-19, the story that capital had built about itself has begun to reveal cracks in its foundations. Capitalism has not succeeded in fully flattening or homogenizing time. Developing in combined and uneven fashion, it has retained the residues of pasts that suggest other futures are possible. Forter assembles a corpus of novels that theorize this insight. He names these fictions speculative realism to highlight how they map the closures of our present while opening that present onto other, more speculative orders of time. In the face of ongoing, overlapping crises, Forter posits, these fictions locate flickering intimations of a utopian somewhen; they illuminate a present charged with precipitates of a transfigured but now imaginable future.

GREG FORTER is a professor of English at the University of South Carolina.

Introduction

1. Speculative Post-Capitalism

2. Time After (Postfeminist) Time

3. The Racial Fetish and the Time Machine

4. Nature’s Temporalities 1: Dreaming/Futurity

5. Nature’s Temporalities 2: Climate Futures Past

6. Transitional Time and the Lamentation of (Post-Apartheid) History

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index