Reading Group: Future Tense. Languages of the Future
27 February 2025, 10:30 am–12:00 pm

Session four of the Future Tense reading group, this time under the theme of 'Prologue and Prophecy.'
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- UCL staff | UCL students
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Institute of Advanced Studies
Location
-
IAS Common GroundG11, ground floor, South WingUCL, Gower St, LondonWC1E 6BTUnited Kingdom
This session explores the explicit future-making of prophecy and how this has been encapsulated in literary forms. By focusing on the example of Greek Tragedy, we consider both the narrative structure of the prologue and its effect on our response to the action of the play, as well as the peculiarly static nature of such action. By considering the teleological nature of prophecy and the prologue we consider an enduring fascination with the future and the narrative structures that bind it. In considering the interrelationship between knowledge and suffering, we aim to bridge conversations from tragic theory to discussions of climate change: what apathetic responses are driven by proclamations of doom?
Materials (excerpts from):
Richard Hamilton: "Prologue Prophecy and Plot in Four Plays of Euripides," in: The American Journal of Philology 99, 3 (1978).
Anthony C. Yu: "New Gods and Old Order: Tragic Theology in the Prometheus Bound," in: Journal of the American Academy of Religion XXXIX, 1 (1971).
Kat Davis & Erin Daina McClellan: “Managing” Inaction and Public Disengagement with Climate Change: (Re)Considering the Role of Climate Change Discourse in Compulsory Education," in: Javnost - The Public 30, 3 (2023).
This reading group is run by IAS Postdoctoral Fellows Peter Browning, Flora Sagers and Josh Weeks, and aims to provide participants with reading materials that consider the future in a multitude of different ways, and from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Whether excavating the past in search of the future, considering apocalyptic understandings of the absence of a future, or thinking through the affects which are future oriented, it aims to provide a number of short extracts per session to accommodate for breadth of knowledge and disciplines and allowing for a depth in our discussions.