Speculative Literature

Will new technologies eventually put an end to book reading? Will people be reading books in the future? Moreover, will there be any people to read? Is speculative fiction (SF) important? These and other related questions provide the core topic of this essay. Firstly we review the role of reading in Fahrenheit 451, and track an extended body position metaphor throughout the novel. Then we discuss the potential future of reading and the impact technology exerts on that, drawing on the ideas of—among others—Luciano Floridi, Vernor Vinge, Ray Kurzweil, and Isaac Asimov. Finally, we briefly comment on the role speculative fiction may  assume in shaping the future of reading.

Theoretical and practical reflections on the act of speculation are currently booming in a unique way, in the economic, political, aesthetic and epistemological domains alike. Paralleling the recent emergence of the “speculative realism” movement in philosophy, a so-called “speculative turn” in art and curatorial practices is being proclaimed.

The Art of Speculation offers a platform for exploring this contemporary phenomenon from an interdisciplinary perspective and critically questioning its origins, significance, and sustainability. While many curators, gallery owners, artists, and theorists currently embrace the discourse on speculation, the Joint Symposium will emphasize the conditions and objectives of transfer of the concept, and will analyze its various sites and protagonists.

1. Aesthetics of Speculation

This group will focus on the ways in which speculation is currently being incorporated into the production, exhibition, and reception of the arts. It will address the question of how “speculative art” presents itself and what means, practices, and concepts of materiality it is based on. The aim of the group is to work out whether a common “aesthetics” or poetology can be determined that is equally inherent in all manifestations currently labelled as “speculative art”. Correspondingly, adequate criteria for analysis and criticism will need to be elaborated. Against this backdrop, we would also like to ask how the collapse of the financial markets has influenced the various manifestations of speculative art, including the strategies art has developed to evade its commodification. A special emphasis will finally be put on the status of subjectivity in speculative art theory and its implications for the notion of aesthetic experience.

2. Scenarios of Speculation

As an epistemological practice, speculation acts to create, play through, and design alternative and/or potential scenarios. As such, it can help us to predict and simultaneously produce alternative “realities”. Computer simulations based on algorithms enable us to model and envision future and past best- and worst-case scenarios. Games and aesthetic in(ter)ventions become future labs in which the potential and non-actual are – critically or neutrally – imagined and negotiated, and “the becoming” is anticipated. These practices thus not only revise spatio-temporal coordinates, but also reorganize them. This group will focus on the creative potential and limitations inherent in artistic, theoretical, and scientific operations and scenarios of speculation, particularly emphasizing practices such as designing, simulating, playing, and experimenting with deviant orders of reality.

3. Temporalities of Speculation

This group will examine the specific temporality of speculative operations. Speculation designs alternative pasts and futures and tries to anticipate, control, and tame time as well as to erase, augment, or overwrite our presence. Against this backdrop, it is necessary to ask about the effect of speculation on existing notions of past, presence and future and their interrelation. Betting on the difference between current and future immaterialities, speculation furthermore appears as an act of creating and sustaining spectres. An analysis of the temporality of speculation thus also needs to ask when those spectres first started haunting us, what purpose they serve and whether we can imagine a world without them. In line with that, this group also aims to trace the particular historicity of speculation itself. As speculation experienced its first boom as a theoretical and aesthetic concept in the 18th century with German romanticism, it is important to ask why it has now gained influence again. This group will thus look at the conditions in which speculation emerged in the 18th century and the objectives its users had as well as the current conceptualization of speculation in order to determine whether a periodicity between the two can be observed.

En este trabajo se estudian de manera comparada dos novelas contemporáneas que recrean la Eneida de Virgilio: Lavinia, de Ursula K. Le Guin, y El silbido del arquero, de Irene Vallejo. En ellas Lavinia y Ana, personajes femeninos secundarios en el poema épico, se hallan interconectadas con el personaje de Virgilio, la primera mediante el diálogo directo y la conciencia de su propia naturaleza fictiva, y a través de la caracterización y la intratextualidad la segunda. Ambas protagonistas comparten su carácter liminal: viven a caballo entre distintos mundos, la infancia y la edad adulta, los poderosos y los humildes, el palacio y la naturaleza, lo divino y lo humano, la vida y la muerte. Su historia es y no es la que cuenta la Eneida. Su identidad metafictiva y liminal las convierte en vehículos para la reflexión sobre la creación poética virgiliana, tema central de estas novelas.

This paper is a comparative study of two contemporary novels which rewrite Virgil’s
Aeneid: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lavinia and Irene Vallejo’s El silbido del arquero. Two secondary female characters in the epic poem, Lavinia and Anna, are closely related to Virgil’s presence as a character through Lavinia’s direct dialogues with him and her metafictional self-awareness, and, in the case of Ana, in terms of characterisation and intratextuality. Both protagonists are liminal figures: they live on the borderline between different worlds, childhood and adulthood, the powerful and the lowly, palace life and nature, the divine and the human, life and death. Their stories are simultaneously told and untold in the Aeneid. Their metafictional and liminal identity turns them into vehicles for a meditation on Virgil’s poetic creation, a key element to these narratives.