The unexpected : narrative temporality and the philosophy of surprise by Currie, Mark, 1962- author instant download

The unexpected : narrative temporality and the philosophy of surprise by Currie, Mark, 1962- author instant download

1 online resource (vii, 184 pages), \"Focusing on surprise, spontaneous eruption and the unforeseeable, The Unexpected argues that stories help us to reconcile what we expect with what we experience. Though narrative is often understood a recapitulation of past events, the book argues that the unexpected and the future anterior, a future that is already complete, are guiding ideas for new understandings of the reading process. It also points beyond that to some of the key temporal concepts of our epoch, of unpredictability, the event, the untimely and the messianic. The Unexpected is an important intervention in narratology and a striking general argument about the cultural significance of surprise. The enquiry is developed by a range of new readings in philosophy and theory, as well as of Sarah Waters's Fingersmith, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending.\"--, Includes bibliographical references and index, Introduction: What lies ahead -- Part I. Surprise and the theory of narrative. A flow of unforeseeable novelty ; Narratological approaches to the unforeseeable -- Part II. The unpredictable and the future anterior. Prediction and the age of the unknowable ; What will have happened: writing and the future perfect ; The untimely and the messianic -- Part III. Time flow and the process of reading. Narrative modality: Possibility, probability and the passage of time ; Temporal perspective: narrative futurity and the distribution of knowledge -- Part IV. The unforeseeable in fictional form. Maximum peripeteia: reversal of fortune and the rhetoric of temporal doubling ; Freedom and the inescapable future ; The philosophy of grammar, Mark Currie is Professor of Contemporary Literature at Queen Mary, University of London, Print version record