Origins and Futures

Origins and Futures: Time Inflected and Reflected provokes an interdisciplinary dialogue about culture, politics, and science’s strategies to divert the relentless trajectory of time. Literature, socio-political policy, physics, among other subjects, demonstrate the human refusal to enlist in temporal determinism. Articles ranging from how detective fiction and international terrorism manipulate the narration of events, to the unlocking of political trauma through forgiveness, to the genetic archaeology of the Human Genome project and the lacunar amnesia of nuclear energy corporations, all argue that wherever human minds meet they wrestle to undo the irrevocable, the irreversible, the fixed. Although such efforts look to the future, they rarely look straight ahead. Whatever their enterprise, writers, philosophers, and scientists believe that origins are alacritous keys to future hopes and aspirations.

Contributors include: Marcus Bullock, Michael Crawford, Patricia Engle, Carol Fischer, J. T. Fraser, Sabine Gross, Paul Harris, Rosemary Huisman, Karmen MacKendrick, Steven Ostovich, Walter Schweidler, Friedel Weinert, and Masae Yuasa.

Raji C. Steineck, Dr. phil. (1999) in philosophy, Bonn University, is Professor of Japanology at the University of Zurich. His main interest is in the philosophy of culture and symbolic forms. He has published extensively on Japanese philosophy and intellectual history, and edited, with Jo Alyson Parker and Paul A. Harris, Time: Limits and Constraints (Brill, 2010).

Claudia Clausius, M.Litt Oxon, Ph D. Toronto, is Associate Professor of English and Chair of Modern Languages at King’s University College/Western University Canada. Her main research area is the intersection between modern art and drama. Among her publications, she has written on Samuel Beckett and Francis Bacon, Paul Klee and modernism, Harold Pinter, and Wole Soyinka.