Presidential Address 1996: Shadows of Futurity: The Literary Imagination, the MLA, and the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

ECAUSE I am sometimes as eagerly confessional as I am incurably epigraphic, I must begin by admitting that I tend to be enthralled by futurology, which I suppose might be defined as the not very scientific science of the ways in which what will be may evolve out of what has been. And though, I hardly need note, this tag end of the 1990s is an especially juicy time for us futurologists, poets and their readers have been approaching the second millennium for over a century, as my three epigraphs emphasize. No matter how you figure it-as a mysterious futurity casting its gigantic shadows upon the literary imagination, as a new day dawning, or as a sun setting over the evening