Published by De Gruyter

Narrating Futures

Edited by: Christoph Bode

Overview
Volumes

This series explores a hitherto unidentified type of narrative: Future Narratives. Narratives are traditionally concerned with past events or with events that are happening right now, and narratives process them into a meaningful sequence. In contrast, Future Narratives preserve a characteristic feature of future time, namely that it is yet undecided, open, and multiple, and that it has not yet crystallized into actuality. They do this by operating with ‘nodes’ as their basic unit – situations that allow for more than one continuation. Future Narratives can be found in print, in film, in video games, in scenarios of world climate change, and in other simulations of future trends. Cutting across all media and genre classifications, this burgeoning corpus still lacks a theory and a poetics. This series offers both – as well as detailed case studies. Firmly rooted in narratology, the project has interesting interfaces with philosophy, the theory of history, media studies, game theory, decision theory, and futurology.

European Research Council Advanced Investigator Grant Research Project

First large-scale conceptualization of future narratives

Offering a theoretical blueprint for mediating political, environmental, and business decision processes

Author / Editor information

Christoph Bode, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany.

Book 2013

Volume 1 Future Narratives

Theory, Poetics, and Media-Historical Moment

Christoph Bode, Rainer Dietrich

More Cite

This head volume of the 'Narrating Futures' series defines and identifies Future Narratives. It parses their characteristic features and aims at an abstract classification of the whole corpus, irrespective of its concrete manifestations across the media. Drawing on different theorems and approaches, it offers a unified theory and a poetics of Future Narratives. Locating the media-historical moment of their emergence, this volume paves the way for the following volumes, which deal with how Future Narratives are refracted through different media.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110272376
ISBN:: 978-3-11-027212-3
ISBN:: 978-3-11-027237-6
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies, general
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2013

Volume 2 Playing the Text, Performing the Future

Future Narratives in Print and Digiture

Felicitas Meifert-Menhard

More Cite

This volume examines the structure of text-based Future Narratives in the widest sense, including choose-your-own-adventure books, forking-path novels, combinatorial literature, hypertexts, interactive fiction, and alternate reality games. How 'radical' can printed Future Narratives really be, given the constraints of their media? When exactly do they not only play with the mere idea of multiple continuations, but actually stage genuine openness and potentiality? Process- rather than product-oriented, text-based Future Narratives are seen as performative and contingent systems, simulating their own emergence.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110272390
ISBN:: 978-3-11-027213-0
ISBN:: 978-3-11-027239-0
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies, general
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2013

Volume 3 Running and Clicking

Future Narratives in Film

Sabine Schenk

More Cite

Running and Clicking examines how Future Narratives push against the confines of their medium: Studying Future Narratives in movies, interactive films, and other electronic media that allow for nodes, this volume demonstrates how the dividing line between film and game is progressively dissolved. Focused on traditional mass media, transitional media, and new media, it also touches on transmedial storytelling and virtual reality and offers a discussion of the political power of the imaginary and the twilight of Future Narratives in the post-human hegemony of the simulated real.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110272437
ISBN:: 978-3-11-027215-4
ISBN:: 978-3-11-027243-7
Subject:: Cultural Studies
Subject:: Genres and Media in Cultural Studies
Subject:: Film
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies, general
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2013

Volume 4 Storyplaying

Agency and Narrative in Video Games

Sebastian Domsch

More Cite

Incontestably, Future Narratives are most conspicuous in video games: they combine narrative with the major element of all games: agency. The persons who perceive these narratives are not simply readers or spectators but active agents with a range of choices at their disposal that will influence the very narrative they are experiencing: they are players. The narratives thus created are realizations of the multiple possibilities contained in the present of any given gameplay situation. Surveying the latest trends in the field, the volume discusses the complex relationship of narrative and gameplay.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110272451
ISBN:: 978-3-11-027216-1
ISBN:: 978-3-11-027245-1
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies, general
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2013

Volume 5 Alternate History

Playing with Contingency and Necessity

Kathleen Singles

More Cite

While, strictly speaking, Alternate Histories are not Future Narratives, their analysis can shed a clear light on why Future Narratives are so different from past narratives. Trying to have it both ways, most Alternate Histories subscribe to a conflicting set of beliefs concerning determinism and freedom of choice, contingency and necessity. For the very first time, Alternate Histories are here discussed against the backdrop of their Other, Future Narratives.

The volume contains in-depth analyses of the classics of the genre,such as Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle and Philip Roth's The Plot against America, as well as less widely-discussed manifestations of the genre, such as Dieter Kühn's N, Christian Kracht's Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten, and Quentin Tarantino's film Inglourious Basterds.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110272475
ISBN:: 978-3-11-027217-8
ISBN:: 978-3-11-027247-5
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Anglo-American Literature
Subject:: 19th Century
Subject:: German Literature
Subject:: 20th Century
Subject:: Literary Theory
Publisher:: De Gruyter