Suchergebnisse

While prognoses about the future are as old as human society, this special issue argues that the proliferation of new ways of modelling, planning, and interpolating the future of resources and environments is an increasing feature of contemporary environmental politics. In our introduction, we draw out two dimensions to this prognostic politics: first, the processes of making predictions about the future; and second, the movement of these predictions through the unstable and messy institutions that act upon the future in the present. We argue that new regimes of environmental forecasting and contests over these prognoses are giving rise to new forms of nature, framings of time and space, and modes of politics.

This paper examines a number of French middle-brow novels, usually called at the time romans de murs, from the period 1880–1910. It shows how, in these stories, doctors are shown to foretell the course of narrative through the diagnosis of certain pathologies, especially psychosexual ones. These pathologies are thus represented as implacable narrative programmes. In effect, most of these novels renounce the standard fictional resources of intrigue and suspense in favour of the relentless working out of their initial prognosis. The authority of medical discourse is therefore not just confirmed and disseminated: it is elaborated as fatality in the very terms of the novel.