How can we relate ideas about uncertainty, unpredictability and randomness to the study of narrative? This lecture approaches the question through one of the most tenacious metaphors in the thinking about temporality – the roll of a dice. It sketches a general context of thought about contingency in the predictive sciences and a more particular account of the way that contingency and futurity have figured in new debates in the humanities in recent years. The argument then turns to the commingling of epistemic stances that are involved in the temporal structure of narrative fiction and the process of narrative comprehension. It aims to show that the dynamic of certainty and uncertainty that structures narrative involves a non-synthetic alternation between futurity and completion which finds its philosophical basis in the motif of the future anterior: not alea jacta est, but alea jacta erit.
Mark Currie is Professor at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Postmodern Narrative Theory (1998; Second Edition 2011), Difference (2004), About Time: Narrative Fiction and the Philosophy of Time (2007), The Unexpected: Narrative Temporality and the Philosophy of Surprise (2012) and The Invention of Deconstruction (2013). More information about his work can be found here.
