Description: The Future as Catastrophe offers a novel critique of the fascination with disaster. Analyzing the catastrophic imaginary from its historical roots to the contemporary popularity of disaster fiction and end-of-the-world blockbusters, Eva Horn argues that apocalypse always haunts the modern idea of a future that can be anticipated and planned.
Brief description: Eva Horn (PhD, Political Theory, University of Konstanz; habilitation, Social and Cultural Sciences, Europa-Universitat Viadrina) is Professor of German and Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna and Distinguished Visiting Max Kade Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia. She is the author of (in English translation) The Secret War: Treason, Espionage, and Modern Fiction (Northwestern, 2013) and (in German) Trauer schreiben: Die Toten im Text der Goethezeit (Fink, 1998).
Review Quotes: The end of the world and the extinction of the human species will be a catastrophe without event, survivor, or witness. Eva Horn's brilliant and copiously informed historical study explores the potential of 'future fictions' as epistemic tools to anticipate the unknowable--to imagine it by giving it shape, investing it with meaning and affect and thereby making it 'real.'--Aleida Assmann, author of Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives