Reading Group: Future Tense. Languages of the Future

This session looks at the past and questions how the past is interrelated with the future (as mediated in the present) specifically looking at the making of the past as a procedure of making of the future. Who shapes the archive and how does the organisation of this material lead to specific narratives that have power (in the present) to shape our futures? 

Materials (excerpts from):
Herman Rapaport: "Archive Trauma: Review of Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression by Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz". Edited by Jacques Derrida. Diacritics 28, 4 (1998)
M. Christine Boyer: The City of Collective Memory
Kerwin Lee Klein: "On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse". Representations 69 (2000)
Samual Bennett: "Mythopoetic legitimation and the recontextualisation of Europe’s foundational myth". Journal of Language and Politics 21, 2 (2022)
Adriana Patiño-Santos & Peter Browning: "Remembering Together: Making sense of exile as a family". In: Language and Memory: Methods, Scales and Stakes. London: Bloomsbury Advances in Sociolinguistics.

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.