Today, the “promise of an infinite future,” Boris Groys observes, “has lost its plausibility.1 In our historical moment, he argues, the future along with time itself appears to be performing what has long been understood as the present’s trademark trick: vanishing. According to Groys and, as I show in great detail elsewhere, according to a striking number of academics and commentators, artists and analysts, politicians and venture capitalists, our present is characterized by a general crisis of futurity.2 And along with what he describes as a pervasive loss of time, Groys argues, we are also confronted with “the loss of the infinite historical perspective.” We “are stuck in the present as it reproduces itself without leading to any future,” he concludes. The problem of an expanding, timeless present that seems to absorb the future into it as a result of our inability to imagine substantive alternatives to the status quo has been discussed by a wide range of philosophers and cultural critics for roughly two decades now, and it also is a topic of great interest for literary and cultural critics. Not surprisingly, the crisis of futurity registers particularly clearly in recent speculative fiction. “Most current attempts to envision the commons of the future in fiction and film are relentlessly dystopian,” writes Ursula K. Heise.3 “From Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) to Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009) and from Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow (2004) to Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009),” she elaborates, “speculative fiction and film tend to envision future breakdowns of democratic governance, justice, education, health systems, and civic awareness far more often than societies that are improved over present ones in any but a narrow technological sense.”4 The central suggestion that Heise forwards here is a familiar if not ubiquitous one by now, and it is usually expressed as a variation on a well-known diagnosis of our present: it is easier to imagine the complete breakdown of civilization or the destruction of our planet than it is to imagine an alternative to capitalism or even a modest improvement to the material logic of our present.

No doubt, Heise’s account of the limits of speculative fiction in the context of the crisis of futurity that seems to accompany our historical moment will strike many as foreshortened. After all, as I show elsewhere in some length, while the future may indeed look bleak in the novels of a notable number of white male authors, it is in other facets of speculative fiction, including Afro-Futurism, postcolonial sf, and Indigenous futurisms, where we find not only striking alternatives to the notion of a timeless present and inaccessible future, but where we also encounter strikingly historicized accounts of the sources of crises of futurity, crises that strike those who have historically been all too familiar with the erasure of futurity and denials of presence by colonialism and capitalist imperialism as decidedly not novel. Such analyses of the highly differentiated kinds of work that forms and genres accomplish in different contexts and of the different temporalities that they are able to make legible in a present that is elsewhere understood to be repressively uniform and inescapably totalizing, however, necessarily begin at a broader scale. It is worth asking some initial, broader questions, and it is in this context that Heise’s suggestions are heuristically helpful. Given the widespread association of our present with a crisis of temporality and futurity, and given that we are living in a time when some suspect that even speculative fiction seems to have lost the ability to imagine alternatives to and ways of moving beyond the limits of an all-consuming, timeless present in ways that are not simply dystopian and apocalyptic, it is worth asking, for instance, what a form like realism could possibly accomplish other than reiterating the same diagnosis and confirming the crisis of futurity? If we are interested in realism today, then we should ask what happens to realism in a present without future.

In recent years, in particular in the context of discussions about “capitalist realism” and in particular in the work of Mark Fisher, as Sean Grattan points out, realism has been read and indeed at times maligned as a symptom of the limitations of the present. Capitalist realism in particular is often understood to constitute the formal confirmation of the exhaustion of future in our time. And yet, Grattan argues, it is important to note, as Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Claire La Berge do, that “capitalist realism is not necessarily only an exhaustive foreclosing of possibility, but that it also offers a site open to being energized critically.”5 More than simply an “updating of socialist realism nor simply an inversion of it,” Shonkwiler and LaBerge write, capitalist realism fundamentally “calls into question what realism is.”6 In what follows, I will explore this basic relation that Grattan, Shonkwiler and La Berge foreground: what realism is determines what realism is able to do today. And if it is true that the rise in new realisms that we have been witnessing over the course of the past decade or two are about far more than yet another index of the absorption of future possibility into a non-transcendable present reality, then we must ask how exactly realism is able to serve as a form of critique in our moment in history. What is realism such that it could be able to provide us with a way to think beyond the limitations of the omnipresent instant of the era of real-time capitalism?

Sean Grattan argues that we must find utopia in genres other than sf. I will argue in this essay that it is in realism that we can find an important key to the utopian imagination in our decidedly anti-utopian times. Possibly surprisingly and no doubt somewhat counterintuitively, it is precisely in a particular mode of contemporary realism that we can find those engagements with the present and those forms of futurity that Heise finds lacking in contemporary speculative fiction. To be sure, realism is not a singular term. Rather, it has a range of different modes, ones that assume specific functions and that are able to carry out particular kinds of work in different contexts and historical moments. I will argue for the significance of one particular lineage of realism and for the importance of a specific critical account of realism that may be isolated and highlighted as important for our moment. I shall refer to this particular mode as prospective realism. In this essay, I aim to sketch out the basic contours of what requires more detail to be elaborated fully: a theory of prospective realism. But I hope that the general assertions that follow may prove helpful both as a starting point for a discussion of a particular way of conceiving of realism that, I would argue, has received insufficient attention so far as well as for current discussions of realism more generally. This essay thus in a sense performs that of which it speaks. The term prolegomena, that is, refers to both the particular form of this essay and to the understanding of a specific kind of realism that I will advance here, one that insists on realism’s value as a way to illuminate the gaps and repressed latencies in the now in order to allow us to read the historical present as prolegomenon, as prehistory of a future that may yet be, one that fulfills those demands for a better tomorrow that remain silenced or ignored by being labeled “unrealistic” in our time. I do so in keeping with accounts of the novel, most notably found in the work of Anna Kornbluh and Timothy Bewes, I would suggest, that foregrounds the value of the novel as a form of thought and as a form of critique.7 The novel assumes a central role in the context of our discussions of contemporary realism and, in turn, in the context of our ability to grapple with the larger political, social, and cultural crises of the present. Framing the arguments that follow in this way, I hope to show that although the question of what realism is and does today may initially appear trivial in a time when criticism and theory as well as popular commentary bemoan our striking inability to imagine alternatives to a present whose problems confront us with ever greater urgency with each passing day, what is at stake here is nothing other than the question of how literature may be able to respond to the challenges of a seemingly omnipresent now by affording us a direly needed form of thought and form of critique that can keep alive the utopian imagination in our historical moment.

Novel Realisms

In her essay “Novel Futures,” Annette Van argues that contemporary concerns over the potential death of the novel—she engages in particular detail with V.S. Naipaul’s infamous proclamation of its death in 1996—are possibly best understood in relation to the question of the possibility of the realist novel. Turning to Bakhtin’s well-known examination of the novel as a form characterized by its “openendedness” that is wedded to a futurism and temporality that distinguishes it from other literary forms, Van suggests that it is this temporality, most notably expressed in realism, that might stand at the center of current engagements with the novel.8 “I think it’s important that we think again about what the realist novel can still do,” Van suggests. Other critics are similarly convinced that the question of realism is of great importance in our moment. Gordon Hutner, for instance, argues that our ability to “historicize the contemporary” requires us to examine “realism as a defining feature of contemporary literature.”9 In recent years, George Levine notes, realism “seems to be struggling back to some of the respectability that it lost” early in the twentieth century and during the reign of postmodernism.10 After the 1960s in particular, Levine argues, “the very notion of representing ‘reality’ in credible ways was taken as reprehensible naivetéor simple bad faith.” Today, however, things seem to have changed. Realism is back. Colleen Lye echoes Levine’s account of the return of realism and of a general concern with reality and the real in contemporary art and literature. “At one point,” she writes, “during the bygone age of postmodernism, nothing was real. Now, everything is—or at least claims to be.”11 And yet, Lye, notes, the return of realism also means that we are once again faced with a series of persisting problems regarding the term’s definition. “If ‘more or less realist’ hardly suffices to capture the uncertainty that surrounds what is happening with literature itself,” she notes, “that is because there is so little agreement as to what we mean by realist.”12 Indeed, she adds, even “within literary critical discourse alone, the term is used in very different, even contradictory, ways.”13 Lye therefore suspects that “realism well may not be a genre or even a type of literature” and that we may have to wonder if the term realism “strictly refers to a method of interpretation and not at all to any attribute of the object.”14 Not only does realism seem to have found a new life in contemporary literature, but the known problem of the conceptual instability or even contradictory nature of the term itself seems to stand at the center of its re-emergence. And it may be in this sense, by paying particular attention to the ways in which realism may be said to function as a mode of interpretation, as a form of thought and of critique, and by examining the manner in which realism’s function may be said to arise precisely from its engagement with its own limits and instabilities, that we can begin to characterize one important facet of realism’s current manifestation.

In recent years, critics have been noting that some of the most interesting manifestations of contemporary realism are not straight-forward versions of what we would traditionally understand as realism. The work of Kim Stanley Robinson is an interesting case in this regard. Heise, for instance, is interested in the novels of Robinson because she finds that they are characterized by a form of realism that is designed to confront those crises of our temporal imagination that contextualize her interview with Robinson that I cite at the beginning of this essay. Although he is most well-known as a science fiction writer, Heise notes that “one of most striking aspects of Robinson’s fiction is its sustained realism.” Like Levine and Lye, Heise associates the turn to realism in the work of novelists like Robinson with a decisive move beyond postmodernism. And while there is some agreement among critics that the return of literary realism over the course of the past two or three decades constitutes a clear signal of a literary historical shift that marks the exhaustion of postmodernism, they also note that this ought to be understood as a particular stage in the history of realism: contemporary realism tends to present itself as a blended form. The political and critical force of Robinson’s novels, from his Science in the Capital trilogy (2004-2007) to his most recent novel New York 2040 (2017), lies to no small degree in its formal experimentation with realism. In order to mediate our continued inability to respond decisively to the challenges posed by climate change and environmental destruction that raise the specter of the relation between the limits of (capitalist) realism and the need for solutions derived from a speculative mode, Robinson’s novels combine realism with speculative fiction in order to activate realism’s critical and political force precisely by exploring its limits without weakening the fundamental commitment to realism itself. Robinson’s novels illustrate the ways in which climate fiction necessitates the development of a new form of realism, one finely attuned to both its possibilities and limitations, a form of realism whose reach is expanded through its connections to other forms and genres, including speculative fiction. That is, the formal problem of realism in climate fiction is directly bound up with the question of the relation between what is considered “realistic” and what is understood to be “speculative” or “fabulist,” which is to say that the formal relation between realism and speculation in novels like New York 2140 serves as a way to critique the ways in which the limits of capitalism determine our sense of which actions and which plans for future change are to be deemed realistic or fantastically unrealistic. In this way, as becomes evident in climate or environmental realism in the context of persisting debates over the reality of climate change and ongoing quarrelling over the degree of realism of conceptions of social and political change that refuse to be bound by the limitations that capitalism imposes on our environmental imagination, realism’s engagement with the limits of realism in the present constitutes not simply a self-reflexive formalist exercise but it enables realism’s political function and ability to locate the root causes of current crises of our imagination in capitalism.

Similar to the work of Robinson, novels like Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013) blend realism with the speculative or the fabulist, and John Wray’s stunningly omnivorous novel The Lost Time Accidents (2016) joins realism with speculative modes and the historical novel. And just like in Robinson’s novels, there is a clear sense in the work of Ozeki and Wray that what is gained in such new, more capacious forms of realism that are finely attuned to realism’s limits depends on the departure from simpler, in the current context limiting rather than productive formal and generic oppositions such as that between realism and anti-realism. What we find in such novels is not simply an exercise in blurring the boundary between realism and the speculative. After all, what would be the point of continuing to engage in this by now surely tired if not utterly clichéd attempt at formal experimentation? Rather, we see the emergence of a new kind of realism that confronts the sociopolitical and imaginative impasses and limitations of our moment precisely through the exploration of the formal limits of realism itself. Thus, more than just restoring our attention to the prickly history of the idea of realism, contemporary realism as represented by the work of Robinson, Ozeki, and Wray offers us examples of a kind of realism that is not plagued or hampered but indeed enabled and enriched by its conceptual prickliness. The complexity of realism’s workings, Levine accordingly argues, may be said to lie precisely in its complicated relationship to reality. And “if it is true that realism as a full representation of the real must fail in any absolute sense,” Levine concludes, then “there are ways in which the efforts of realism…continue to matter and to require not passive recording but strenuous art.”15 And what we find in the blended realisms of the contemporary novel is just such a commitment to strenuous art, one that, as Levin puts it, indicates to us that “once the limits of the mode are laid bare…realism remains an important, even a necessary mode of literary art.”16

There is a literary historical argument here, too, however, which we need to take into account when we ask not just what realism is but when we realize that this question is best asked historically specifically. Asking what realism is in the conditions of the present means that we are not invested in determining a stable, trans-historical definition of realism but rather locate realism’s ontology in its function and possibilities in the context of a particular historical moment. Asking what is realism able to do today in turn means that we ask questions about the rises and falls of realism, the waxing and waning of a concept whose meaning, function, and significance lies in the constantly changing ways in which it reinvents itself and binds itself to changing material and sociopolitical conditions. Like Lye, Heise, and Levine, Madhu Dubey shows that the return of realism in contemporary fiction indicates a shift beyond postmodernism. And yet, Dubey argues, it is important to foreground that this transition away from postmodernism and toward a new form of realism was bound up with a demand for the renewal of literature’s political project: the development of a new social novel that is able to re-activate the novel’s political function and its ability to critically engage with the historical present. Opposing the much-cited postmodern conviction that “the realistic novel was no longer possible,” Dubey reminds us, Tom Wolfe’s 1989 manifesto for “the new social novel” issues a call for writers “to take on the pressing social issues of their time.”17 This demand for a return to social realism, she stresses, was directly bound up with “the beginning of the end of American literary postmodernism. If postmodernism ended some time around 1990,” Dubey concludes, “American fiction in the following decades…is said to be marked by a renewed engagement with the social world.”18 And yet, Dubey stresses, while we can point to a general return to realism after postmodernism, we also witness the return of specific manifestations thereof. Instead of the new social realism for which Wolfe calls, for instance, novelists like Jonathan Franzen describe their own work as an expression of “tragic realism,” a form that is not aimed at change but at preservation, as Dubey shows. Such novels, she stresses, moreover indicate a form of realism that posits only “a residual function for the novel.”19 The question of what kind of political work realism is able to do today must therefore be answered by identifying the ways in which particular modes of literary realism address the particular problems of our time. One of the fundamental distinctions that we can draw, then, is that between forms of realism that are preservative or conservative and that merely confirm the crisis of futurity and the perceived lack of cultural imaginaries aimed at substantive social change on one hand; and those forms of realism that aim for future change by engaging with realism’s own history and with its possibilities and limits precisely in order free us from the compulsion to accept the limits of capitalism as the limits of our imagination. I shall refer to the latter form of realism as prospective realism.

“Naming the Things that are Absent”

Dubey’s account of the emergence of new forms of contemporary (social) realism is instructive for our purposes here. Implicit in Dubey’s analysis is an interest in realism not as a mode or problem of representation but rather as a form of critique—Dubey is interested in the emergence of “a new kind of fiction that once again aspires to… critique the social world.”20 It is this new critical realist fiction, I would argue, that we find in the work of Robinson, Ozeki, and Wray as well as in the work of a range of young American writers, including Rachel Kushner, Jennifer Egan, Ben Lerner, and Nathaniel Rich, writers who expand our conception of what realism is and does precisely by probing its limits in the context of the temporal crises of the capitalist present. Critical engagements with these forms of realism will benefit from the aim to move beyond classic accounts, such as the work of Ernst Auerbach, that describe realism as a problem of representation and mimesis. Frankfurt School critical theory, for instance, contains accounts of realism that may model for us a different trajectory. Theodor W. Adorno, for example, insists on the importance of understanding novelistic realism in ways that are not limited to concerns with the representation of reality. “If the novel wants to remain true to its realistic heritage and tell how things really are,” Adorno emphasizes, it must do so precisely by abandoning “a realism that only aids the façade in its work of camouflage by reproducing it.”21 What exactly this may mean and how it may allow us to expand our conception of the work of realism emerges when we see realism with Ernst Bloch as a matter of laying bare the present’s absences more so than focusing on matters of presence or the existing, as a form that engages with the present critically in a manner that is fundamentally aimed at transcendence rather than representation. And in particular in a moment in history that is widely understood to be marked by a non-transcendable, omnipresent form of contemporaneity and by a crisis of futurity, such a prospective form of realism that seeks to read the present historically by making legible those paths forward that exist in the present as latent, repressed possibility is able to generate a counterpoint to those accounts of realism that merely read it as confirmation of a perpetual capitalist present. “Where the prospective horizon is continuously kept in sight,” Bloch writes,

reality appears there as what it is concretely: as a network of paths (Wegegeflecht) of dialectical processes that take place in an unfinished world, in a world that would be totally unchangeable without the enormous future, the real possibilities within it. This includes the totality, which does not represent the isolated entirety of each part of a process, but which represents the entirety of the matter that is pending in the process in general. Therefore, it is a matter that is still tendentious and latent. This alone is realism.22

Realism thus conceived is not just an orientation toward the existing, but it is also and indeed primarily a way to uncover the present as fundamentally marked by lack, of illustrating what could have been and what may yet be by revealing what is missing from what is. Prospective realism does not merely represent reality. It establishes a critical relation to it, and in this way it positions itself as a relation of mediation that stands opposed to the immediacy that becomes the defining condition of the age of real time capitalism.

Throughout his work, Bloch argues that our ability to imagine alternatives to the existing is limited by the constricting singular, linear temporal imagination that is developed under capitalism. Recognizing the present as a fundamentally plural form of temporality, as a time that is as much defined by the existing as it is marked by the denied possibilities, silenced demands for literation, and unheard appeals for a better life and world that continue to exist in the present as latent possibility restores our attention to the gaps in reality, to that which is missing, to the excluded and the repressed. Realism as conceived by Bloch is about laying bare reality not as a given to be represented but as an ongoing dialectical process whose totality, the plurality of timelines and paths that point beyond the existing, is made concrete by a prospective realism that is aimed at making legible the present’s gaps and latencies in part through the engagement with its own limits. In this way, prospective realism serves as a form of thought and as a form of critique that refuses the narrowing of possibility and of our imagination under capitalism. Prospective realism understands the historical present as a time defined by latency. Novels like Lydia Millett’s How the Dead Dream (2007) and Willy Vlautin’s The Free (2014) address themselves to this latency, to that which remains unrealized and deemed impossible in the present, providing us with an account of reality as an impoverished version of what is possible and of the historical present as the time of unrealized potentiality, of possibility defined within the limits of capitalism. Prospective realism marks a new moment in the political life of literature, and it also provides us with one way of concretely understanding what it may mean to historicize the present. Thus in addition to noting the new sincerity or the new wave seriousness in contemporary literature that leaves behind postmodernism’s play and irony that critics have been describing in recent years, we may be well served to remember Kojin Karatani’s suggestion that the opposite of play is not seriousness but rather reality, adding that this reality is, of course, history.23

Levine is convinced that realism is “in its very nature a paradoxical form.” It traditionally seeks to represent the experience of (material) reality while, for this very reason, it inevitably also runs into the persisting tension between empiricism and idealism, between mind and external nature.24 And yet, those forms of contemporary realism that are aimed at a critique of the historical present also posit this investment in critique in opposition to a primary interest in experience. Prospective realism understood in the ways indicated above is fundamentally invested in a critique of immediacy, one that assumes particular significance in the age of real time capitalism in which immediacy becomes one of the fundamental material and social principles and mechanisms of valorization, exchange, and communication. Refusing the logic of immediacy that privileges experience over imagination, thought, and critique, such a form of realism highlights mediation as a necessary relation to material reality for the development of critique, one that may also be said to resolve the persisting tension between realism and subjectivism in modernism and postmodernism. Hayden White reminds us that we must understand the emergence of realism as the development of a genre of history writing and history as a concept in theoretical thought (a form of thinking time), as “the development of realism by the new focus on the present as history.”25 What this development requires, he stresses, is something more than the attempt to document or represent experience. “No one practices or even experiences ‘history’ as such,” White writes, “because ‘history’ is an abstraction from the experience of change in society.”26 “While one can no doubt experience the effects of social change,” he concludes, “this is quite another matter from the putative ‘experience of history’.”27 And just like history is not accessible through immediate experience but only through mediation, analysis, and critique, the historical present is not a time with which prospective realism engages primarily on the plane of experience. Through its refusal of immediacy, prospective realism offers us a reading of our time, and it is in this way, not by representing reality but by establishing a relation of mediation to material reality, that it serves as a form of critique of the historical present.

One of the defining characteristics and most notable accomplishments of the nineteenth-century realist novel, Auerbach famously notes, is that it offered human beings for the first time a representation of “the full range of their everyday reality.”28 “It was due solely to this endeavor,” he claims, the endeavor “which we call Realism, that it became possible for literature to maintain a vital connection to the other ways in which contemporary society expressed itself—to its science, its economics, and its thoughts and desires.”29 In this sense, then, contemporary realism tries to accomplish the same goal that Auerbach associates with realism’s emergence: to articulate the relation between literature and social, political, and material reality in the present. Yet, today, realism does so precisely by refusing the notion that its mission lies in the obligation or ability to capture the full range of everyday reality. Instead, realism seeks to capture the ways in which the fullness of life and of the demands for liberation and for a better world are perpetually reduced to an impoverished version of itself in the capitalist present. And in order to advance such a critique of the lack of fullness in our present, realism refuses the primacy of experience and immediacy in favor of critique and mediation. One way to express this difference on the level of narrative is that such a form of realism that mediates a negative totality, one that highlights absences and unfulfilled possibility as more significantly indicative of the historical present than the existing, is that it is invested not in point of view but in standpoint. After all, Guido Mazzoni reminds us, when literature is worth its salt and refuses the fragmentation of the social and the collective into the immediate and individual, “we follow [the heroes of narrative fiction] not so much because we are interested in the content of their desires, but because we share the form of their condition, the grammar of their existence.”30

It is worth pointing out here that a focus on a kind of realism that is mainly interested not in interiority and matters of experience but in a historical understanding of the conditions present, which is to say a shift away from immediacy and toward mediation, is interestingly linked to recent critical debates that revolve around the tension between literary reading conceived as immediate experience on one hand and reading understood as critique on the other.31 Of particular note here is once more the work of Kornbluh, who argues persuasively that critique may be understood as a central characteristic of the novel form itself.32 Thus, such critical discussions contain a rich resource for our analysis of prospective realism that model what Bewes describes as a practice of “reading with the grain,” which means to direct the theory and form of reading that the text itself develops back at it through our critical interrogations.33 If we therefore examine the particular form of reading and critique, of making meaning of the historical present, that prospective realism forwards, then we see that what is truly at stake in prospective realism is not the degree of realistic representation, the conflict between ideas and reality, or the tension between different accounts of reality in which critical traditions of realism beginning with Auerbach are mainly interested, but rather the ways in which prospective realism is able to mediate between epistemology and material reality and the ways in which realism, understood as mediation, makes the material world knowable to us. Prospective realism provides us with a particular form of thought aimed at a critique of the limits of the present, and in doing so it provides us with an understanding of thought that may be said to continue the tradition of critical theory in artistic form: thought itself is conceived as a form of praxis. Just as “physical labour transforms and negates the material world under changing historical circumstances,” David Held writes in his outline of the foundational principles of Frankfurt School critical theory, “so mental labour, under changing historical conditions, alters its object world through criticism.”34 As always, we may turn to Adorno for a more pointed version of this foundational commitment of critical theory that, I would argue, also constitutes one of the basic commitments of prospective realism: “we are not to philosophize about concrete things; we are to philosophize, rather, out of those things.”35

Prospective realism may thus be understood as a form of immanent critique of the present. The basic methodological operation of critical theory, immanent critique, as Held reminds us, quoting Max Horkheimer, is to assess “the breach between ideas and reality.” What this means is that immanent critique confronts “the existent, in its historical context, with the claim of its conceptual principles, in order to criticize the relation between the two and thus transcend them.”36 Aiming to investigate the social world “in the movement of its development,” as Held puts it, immanent critique examines the contradictions inherent in concepts themselves and the tension between ideas and lived reality in order to afford us a new understanding of a concept, of an object, or of reality, one that understands the object of analysis as always in flux, this aiming for the transcendence of the present. This development and mobility of the object that arises from its immanent contradictions that critique seeks to lay bare also reveals that plural temporality in the present that we may otherwise understand as history. Examining present in its development and as history in the making, immanent critique provides us with a particularly salient method with which to confront the limits and the purported immobility of our present without future, and it is prospective realism that concretely models for us this form of thought. Like immanent critique, prospective realism is aimed at reading the present in a manner that reveals the object in flux by doing a kind of work that we traditionally associate more directly with speculative fiction: through cognitive estrangement from our own present, and by laying bare the immanent contradictions as well as the latencies that exist as repressed or denied possibility in the present and that demand realization, prospective realism aims at the transcendence of the limits of the now.

Prospective realism narrates and reads the present as prehistory in order to free it from the grasp of a petrified temporal imagination. Far from simply confirming the future’s collapse into a timeless, omnipresent now, prospective realism serves as a site for imagining futurity and change via a particular relation to the present that we may understand as a form of immanent critique. In this way, it also provides us with a form of critique and a mediated relation to the now that aims to reveal and refuse immediacy as the fundamental principle of real-time capitalism. Prospective realism constitutes an important facet of realism today that warrants detailed examination, for it explores not only the political function of realism and the possibility of a new social novel but it also marks a notable moment in the history of realism. Prospective realism foregrounds and insists upon realism’s important function as a form of critique of the present that allows us to read and know our time historically, which is a particularly significant aspect of the work of literature in the context of a historical moment that is elsewhere understood to be marked by the end of history, futurity, and possibly time itself. In such a moment, in a present that is often understood as ever-expanding and broadening and that appears to absorb our imagination of future change and possibility into itself, prospective realism’s insistence on the gaps and latencies in reality does an important kind of work that may be understood as continuing the tradition of immanent critique. Prospective realism may be described with Herbert Marcuse as a form of literature dedicated to “naming the things that are absent,” and, as Marcuse stresses by naming the things that are absent, we are able to “break the spell of the things that are.”37

1. Boris Groys, “Comrades of Time” e-flux 11 (2009): n. pag.
2. See Mathias Nilges, Right-Wing Culture in Contemporary Capitalism: Regression and Hope in a Time Without Future (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2019).
3. Ursula K. Heise, “Realism, Modernism, and the Future: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson” ASAP/Journal 1.1 (2016): 17.
4. Heise, “Realism, Modernism, and the Future” 17.
5. Sean Grattan, Hope Isn’t Stupid: Utopian Affects in Contemporary American Literature (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017): 8-9.
6. Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Claire La Berge, “Introduction: A Theory of Capitalist Realism,” Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Claire La Berge eds. Reading Capitalist Realism (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014): 14, 16.
7. See Anna Kornbluh, “We Have Never Been Critical: Toward the Novel as Critique” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 50.3 (2017); and Timothy Bewes, “Reading With the Grain: A New World in Literary Criticism” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 21.3 (2010).
8. Annette Van, “Novel Futures” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 43.1. (2010): 158-59.
9. Gordon Hutner, “Historicizing the Contemporary: A Response to Amy Hungerford” American Literary History 20.1-2 (2008): 423.
10. George Levine, “Literary Realism Reconsidered: ‘The world in its length and breadth’” in Matthew Beaumont ed. Adventures in Realism (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2007): 13.
11. Colleen Lye, “Afterword: Realism’s Futures” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 49:2 (2016): 343.
12. Lye, “Afterword: Realism’s Futures” 343.
13. “Afterword: Realism’s Futures” 343.
14. “Afterword: Realism’s Futures” 343.
15. Levine, “Literary Realism Reconsidered” 14.
16. “Literary Realism Reconsidered” 14.
17. Madhu Dubey, “Post-Postmodern Realism?” Twentieth-Century Literature 57.3 & 57.4 (2011): 364.
18. “Post-Postmodern Realism?” 364.
19. “Post-Postmodern Realism?” 369.
20. “Post-Postmodern Realism?”364.
21. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel” in T.W Adorno Notes to Literature: Volume 1 trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia UP, 1991): 32.
22. Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1988): 155.
23. Kojin Karatani, History and Repetition (New York: Columbia UP, 2012): 164.
24. “Literary Realism Reconsidered” 15.
25. Hayden White, “Anomalies of Genre: The Utility of Theory and History for the Study of Literary Genres” New Literary History 34 (2003): 600.
26. White, “Anomalies of Genre” 600.
27. “Anomalies of Genre” 600.
28. Erich Auerbach, Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach (James I. Porter, ed.) (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2013): 145.
29. Auerbach, Time, History, and Literature 145.
30. Guido Mazzoni, Theory of the Novel trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2017): 375.
31. For a detailed discussion of these recent critical debates, see the special issue “Literary Studies After Postcritique” of Amerikastudien/American Studies (64.4, February 2020), which contains essays on the topic by Timothy Bewes, Sheri-Marie Harrison, Andrew Hoberek, Carolyn Lesjak, Lisa Siraganian, and Clemens Spahr.
32. Kornbluh, “We Have Never Been Critical.”
33. Bewes, “Reading With the Grain.”
34. David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990): 204.
35. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics. E.B. Ashton (London and New York, Continuum, 1973): 33.
36. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory 183.
37. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (New York and London: Routledge, 2002): 71.