We live in a world that seems to have largely lost faith in politics and in the dialectic of history . While experienced differently depending on geographical location and socio-political circumstances, our societies are affected by a profound sense of powerlessness, disenchantment, and obstructed agency with respect to the possibility of significantly transforming the political-economic order that shapes our lives and the world itself. The current political conjuncture is characterised by a tension between fast-paced social and technological transformations and the immutability of the political-economic system within which we live. My project aims to interrogate and challenge this sense of political ‘stuckness’ and stalled imagination through literature. The goal is to analyse the webs of narratives that undergird the global political predicament and explore how we can devise new ‘horizons of expectation’. Using literary texts as laboratories for critical analysis, I will explore how literature can foster a ‘sense of the possible’. If our political predicament is defined by ‘symbolic misery’ and a faltering political imagination, literature might help us to open new avenues of transformation by working through the past, foregrounding the contingency and openness of human history, and imagining alternative futures.