Abstract
If Fredric Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future links the renewal of utopian impulses after 1989 to the genre of science fiction, this article contends that science fiction and utopian writing alone cannot account for the problematics of futurity in contemporary German literature. Focusing on twenty-first-century “new stories” by Alexander Kluge and essay fiction by Yoko Tawada, the article compares the authors' literary configuration of time travel and parallel worlds to illuminate specific functions of futurity in stylistically divergent texts and literary projects. Analysis of Kluge's Tür an Tür mit einem anderen Leben (2006) and Tawada's “Zukunft ohne Herkunft” (2000) and “Eine Heidin in einem Heidekloster” (2009) additionally challenges some pivotal conventions in scholarship on these authors, notably the centrality of utopia and montage for Kluge and tropes of travel and transformation for Tawada. This article's larger aim is to expand the critical vocabulary for evaluating the style and stakes of futurity in contemporary literature.
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