Modernist futures: re-reading 1922

Abstract

ABSTRACT We are used to thinking of modernist works, à la Ricoeur, as ‘tales about time’, either as marking ruptures in time, or cycling back on time. In recent criticism, in what has been seen as a move beyond the historicism of the new modernist studies, there has been significant attention paid to the future in modernism, and indeed the futures of modernism. This paper will attend to how some of the key modernist texts of 1922, including Ulysses, Jacob’s Room, and the beginnings of Mrs Dalloway, address futurity in various forms (prolepsis, prophecy, speculation), and open themselves to possible futures. More than a century on from the annus mirabilis of ‘high’ modernism, what accounts for the continued ‘usefulness’ of such works as ways of thinking about and preparing for what Joyce called ‘the imprevidibility of the future’? And what are the implications for modernist studies, at this commemorative moment, of a future-oriented criticism?