Backing into the Future: The Classical Tradition and Its Renewal

"Prospective readers puzzled by the somewhat enigmatic title Backing into the Future may well come to the conclusion that it is a reference to the amusing film produced in 1985, called Back to the Future. But in fact the source of the title is much older. The phrase is based on a number of expressions found in ancient Greek literary texts: the chorus's description of its bewilderment in Sophocles's Oedipus the King, for example — 'not seeing what is here nor what is behind' — or the charact...