Tuesday 10 March 2026, 2pm
Pauling Centre, Oxford
All welcome
The future, we are given to understand, changed fundamentally in the twentieth century. If glimpsing at it had previously been the domain of shamans, prophets, and fortune tellers, technological innovations and the development of methods like game theory and scenario planning rendered the future calculable. Maria Christou’s current monograph, Calculating the Future: The Aesthetics of Prediction, examines literature from the mid-twentieth century to the present, and discovers the emergence of new protagonists and forms that tell the story of how calculating the future brought about not control, but a rationalised devaluation of action.
For the purposes of this talk, Christou turns to Muriel Spark’s work, where things prove more complicated than the narrative above suggests. Spark’s fiction is populated with astrologers, fortune tellers, clairvoyants, Tiresias-like figures, as well as god-like writers; in it, the future is conceptualized as destiny. What does Spark’s vision of the future say about the question of calculability and of human agency?
Maria Christou is a Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Manchester. She is currently on a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, finishing her second monograph, Calculating the Future: The Aesthetics of Prediction. Her first monograph, Eating Otherwise: The Philosophy of Food was published in 2017 by Cambridge University Press. Her British-Academy funded exhibition Imagining Tomorrow: The Artefacts of Prediction is currently on at Manchester Museum (until June 2026).
Divination, Oracles, and Omens Network, TORCH Networks
