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William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity by Jay Watson (review)

contraception, and hypnopaedia, James Joyce captured its new vocabulary. T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis reacted against the series’ scientific claims: while the former disavowed a mundanely devised future, the latter repudiated science as a new creed. Saunders’s study surpasses the remit of book history and its contemporary affiliations. Rather, it furnishes a sustained commentary on how ‘To-Day and To-Morrow’ partakes of futurology and predicts ‘biospheres, mobile phones, and virtual reality, but not the digital processor, the crisis in obesity, or the resurgence of religious fundamentalisms’ (p. ). To Saunders, accuracy of predictions matters only as a reminder that any ‘horizon scanning’ has blind spots. e series may indeed leave ‘a computer-shaped hole’ in its imaginings (p. ), yet this gap hardly compromises either the project’s poetics or its audacity. Saunders deplores the recent cultural tendencies to relegate the future to a museum or extrapolate its fulfilment to the present moment. His arguments against the end of the future amount to a defence of ‘human freedom, including the freedom to imagine better everyday lives’ (p. ). As history refuses to end according to Francis Fukuyama’s scenario, Imagined Futures takes on additional urgency in the midst of the COVID- pandemic.