American Futurisms
[Repris de l'introduction] Just over a century ago, in the seemingly post-apocalyptic, post-war world of 1918, Van Wyck Brooks published his essay “On Creating a Usable Past” in which he famously called for the creation of a new American cultural history that would furnish the nation, and the post-war world, with a “usable past.” In the context of current predictions of climate catastrophe and the mass extinction of life on our planet, Brooks’s call for reinventions of the past in order to imagine alternative futures takes on a particularly powerful resonance. This was felt during the Biennial Conference of the Swiss Association for North American Studies (SANAS), which took place at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, in early November 2024. The present volume of SPELL is based on papers delivered at that conference, on the topic American Futures. It was early on the second day of the conference that we heard the announcement of the US election results that have since marked a significant shift in political, social, and cultural life, the implications of which are being felt globally.
Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature, 46
Textes en libre accès sur le site du journal