BOOK OF ABSTRACTS LANGUAGE, LITERATURE, FUTURE 2025 / BLOCKADE

In the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century, and in the context of all the well-known, well-documented, and much-analyzed global and local socio-political crises and wars, as well as the increasingly visible class inequalities and consequences of the climate change, the very mention of the future seems like a threat: for the greater part of humanity, plant, and animal life, the future is not guaranteed, even at the level of biological, physical survival – quite the opposite. On the other hand, new smart (?) technologies, devices, and media are being pompously announced, imposed, and somewhat uncritically accepted: in the name of the future, and under the slogan of making life easier, these are radically changing societies and state structures; redefining the very meaning of human; facilitating surveillance and punishment; ruthlessly destroying the natural world, and further deepening the gap between the rich and the poor. The fourth industrial revolution is accompanied by numerous seductive discourses of transhumanism, posthumanism, and the neoliberal ideology of the individual, all of which – especially the discourses related to the management of one’s own body and health – are oriented towards the future, whether personal, or the more distant, socio-political one; victory over perishable individual corporeality and the technology-provided immortality are loudly proclaimed. In these discourses, therefore, the future is bright. As with the end of history, which Francis Fukuyama announced in 1992, these proclamations should be taken seriously, but also read in the context of social and political relations, bearing in mind that certain theories and theses, Fukuyama’s being a particularly good illustration, serve merely as an ideological justification for specific political decisions. Finally, it should be noted that, despite the futuristic face worn by the developed societies globally, and despite the supposed end of history, the refeudalization of social relations is becoming increasingly obvious: a return to the past which was thought to have been forever left behind by certain enlightened nations, as early as the end of the eighteenth century. The general theme of the Language, Literature, Future 2025 conference is future - as a threat, hope, problem, phenomenon, motive, construct - in literature, language, and culture. Discussing future in literature can include analyses of historically and culturally specific visions of future in utopias and dystopias, and science fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for example, but also in much earlier works, such as medieval eschatological and apocalyptic texts. The connections between literature and future can be explored through the examination of children’s literature and young adult literature as well, since children and young adults are the future of humanity in the literal sense, even if they are not the only audience of the literature that is named after them. Here, it is the didactic aspects of such works that are of particular importance: the various forms of teaching and lessons that are necessarily oriented towards the time ahead, because, as Graham Greene states, “in childhood all books are books of divination, telling us about the future” (Reynolds 2007: 10). Read in the context of ecocriticism and critical animal studies, moreover, some literary texts – but also films as a “cultural practice” – expose ideologies, such as anthropocentrism, which are at the root of the current massive devastation of the natural and animal world. By questioning the concept of human exceptionalism and exploring the inseparability of human and nonhuman animals, such texts and readings can act correctively and provide a basis for building a radically different, more hopeful, and sustainable future. As far as language and language science are concerned, there are, again, countless possibilities for discussing the diverse meanings and practices of the future. The use of artificial intelligence in linguistic research opens new possibilities for the analysis of different grammatical phenomena in a language, but also in the process of translation. Likewise, examining the breadth of influence of foreign languages (especially English, which is a lingua franca, and is considered a “domestic foreign language”) on the Serbian language, i.e., examining two or more languages in contact, is one of the more important linguistic issues, especially in the context of the creation of a new lexicon, the development of new meanings, and the acceptance of the collocations and structures from foreign languages. From the lexicographic point of view, the creation of an even greater number of online dictionaries is expected, as well as their more frequent use, and various applications in analysis. Finally, current tendencies in individuals and in society can be examined from a sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic point of view, and from the point of view of the new linguistic theories – which will give us more concrete insights for the future.