Reading Contingency

NB. IN VIEW OF THE UCU STRIKE ON 30TH NOV, THIS TALK HAS BEEN POSTPONED UNTIL MARCH 8TH.

David Wylot from the University of Leeds presents a talk in the series “Current Research in Narrative Studies,” the research seminar of the British and Irish Association for Narrative Studies. These seminars are held in a hybrid format, with speakers and audience from the Association membership around the country, hosted at York by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Narrative Studies. 

Abstract:

The representation of chance in narrative fiction is often caught in a double bind. On the one hand, chance’s presence reveals authorial and aesthetic manipulation, thereby emphasising the distance between reading chance and chance in lived experience; on the other, chance’s absence is said to result in a deterministic narrative world that is a far cry from modern understandings of lived chance, thereby emphasising, once again, the distance between reading chance and chance in lived experience. First, I consider traditional narratological solutions to this dilemma. Second, I turn to the framework of narrative temporality and look to the relevance of the philosophy of contingency for approaching the problem. Third and finally, I test the idea that the experience of reading a contingent event in narrative fiction can model certain challenges that arise in the philosophy of contingency, and in ways that might rethink the distance between reading chance and living it. 

Bio:

David Wylot is a Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Leeds. His monograph, Reading Contingency: The Accident in Contemporary Fiction (Routledge, 2020), explores the relationship between the phenomenology of reading, narrative, and chance, and his next project sets out to consider points of contact between narrative theory and the study of the book. He has work forthcoming on the book and narrative in digital culture.