SOURCE: “Playing a Game of Ontology: A Postmodern Reading of The Futurological Congress,” in Extrapolation, Vol. 33, No. 1, Spring, 1992, pp. 32–40.

In the following essay, Swirski examines the interpenetration of reality and illusion in The Futurological Congress and argues that the narrative's self-reflexive structure is not an autonomous framework, but integral to the novel itself.

Among the consequences of the “radical redescriptions” (Rorty 7) of epistemology wrought by modern revolutions in science, philosophy, and literary theory were the profound changes in the theory of knowledge in general, and the theory of literature in particular. The upheaval has been latent ever since the late Enlightenment, and the epistemic problems of its new philosophy which, struggling for immutable clarity, were forced to regard its own methodology with increasing skepticism.¹ Of all epistemic shifts ushered in by the modern sensibility, perhaps the most sweeping and fundamental was the abandonment of the claim to omniscience...