History of the Present

This book poses the question of contemporary historical consciousness across a wide spectrum of cultural phenomena ranging from historiography to heritage and museum studies, from the globalization of the novel to the rise of science fiction, and from the aestheticization of everyday life to the question of the meaning of the present.

David Roberts is Emeritus Professor in the School of Languages and Literatures at Monash University, Australia. He is the author of Art and Enlightenment: Aesthetic Theory after Adorno and The Total Work of Art in European Modernism, the co-author of Dialectic of Romanticism: A Critique of Modernism, the editor of Reconstructing Theory: Gadamer, Habermas, Luhmann, and the co-editor of Comic Relations: Studies in the Comic, Satire and Parody.

Introduction 1. The Constitution of Cultural Modernity 2. From the Modern to the Contemporary 3. The Past Present: History as Trauma 4. The Present Past: History as Heritage 5. The Future Present: Science Fiction and the Time of the Novel 6. The Present Future: From World Literatures to Global Literature 7. The Present for the Present: The Museum of Contemporary Art 8. The Absolute Present: Modern, Postmodern, Contemporary