Prolepsis

Prolepsis

From New Books in Turkish Studies by New Books Network

March 23, 2026 · 17 min

About this episode

Gloria Fisk discusses the concept of prolepsis and its implications in narrative forms, particularly in relation to structural violence.

In this episode of High Theory, Gloria Fisk talks to Kim about Prolepsis. Defined by Gerard Genette in the 1970s, prolepsis is a flash forward, the opposite of analepsis, a flash back. Initially the province of high modernism, this rhetorical device has become a well-worn trope with a surprising aptitude for representing violence in our current moment. Fisk shows us how prolepsis dramatizes the workings of structural violence in narrative form. In the episode, Gloria references Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton’s Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (Random House 1967) and Michael Dango's Crisis Style: The Aesthetics of Repair (Stanford UP 2021). The transcript lives here as a WordDoc and here as a PDF. Gloria Fisk writes about contemporary literature in a global context, with a particular interest in the novel. She works as an associate professor of English at Queens College, CUNY. Her areas of interest include the critical debates surrounding world literature in the U.S. as well as novel theory, postcolonial studies, translation theory, and critical writing. In her first book, Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature (Columbia UP 2018), Gloria reads the Turkish…

People in this episode

Host: Kim

Guest: Gloria Fisk

Topics covered

  • prolepsis
  • narrative form
  • structural violence
  • modernism
  • literature
  • postcolonial studies

Keywords

  • prolepsis
  • narrative
  • structural violence
  • modernism
  • literature
  • postcolonial studies
  • flash forward

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Queens College, CUNY, Columbia UP, Random House, Stanford UP

Books & works: Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, Crisis Style: The Aesthetics of Repair, Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature

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