The Unexpected : : Narrative Temporality and the Philosophy of Surprise / / Mark Currie.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Edinburgh University Press Backlist eBook-Package 2013-2000
• VerfasserIn: Currie, Mark,
• Place / Publishing House: Edinburgh : : Edinburgh University Press, , [2022]; ©2013
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: The Frontiers of Theory : FRTH
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (192 p.)

This new study asks how stories affect the way we think about time and, in particular, how they condition thinking about the future. Focusing on surprise and the unforeseeable, the book argues that stories are mechanisms that reconcile what is taking place with what will have been. This relation between the present and the future perfect offers a grammatical formula quite different from our default notions of narrative as recollection or recapitulation. It promises new understandings of the reading process within the strange logic of a future that is already complete. It also points beyond that to some of the key temporal concepts of our epoch: prediction and unpredictability, uncertainty, the event, the untimely and the messianic. The argument is worked out in new readings of Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending.Key FeaturesAn original discussion of the relation of time and narrativeAn important intervention in narratologyA striking general argument about the workings of the mindProvides an overview of the question of surprise in philosophy and literature

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Series Editor’s Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: What Lies Ahead -- PART I Surprise and the Theory of Narrative -- 1. A Flow of Unforeseeable Novelty -- 2. Narratological Approaches to the Unforeseeable -- PART II The Unpredictable and the Future Anterior -- PART II The Unpredictable and the Future Anterior -- 4. What Will Have Happened: Writing and the Future Perfect -- 5. The Untimely and the Messianic -- PART III Time Flow and the Process of Reading -- 6. Narrative Modality: Possibility, Probability and the Passage of Time -- 7. Temporal Perspective: Narrative Futurity and the Distribution of Knowledge -- PART IV The Unforeseeable in Fictional Form -- 8. Maximum Peripeteia: Reversal of Fortune and the Rhetoric of Temporal Doubling -- 9. Freedom and the Inescapable Future -- 10. The Philosophy of Grammar -- Bibliography -- Index