Output details
29 - English Language and Literature
Queen Mary University of London
The Unexpected: Narrative Temporality and the Philosophy of Surprise
The Unexpected is the first major study of surprise in literature and philosophy. It offers a critique of linguistic approaches to time in contemporary cognitive narratology by focusing on questions of tense in continental philosophy and aesthetics. It offers a detailed survey of thought about unforeseeable events in contemporary philosophy, a theoretical assessment of the cognitive function of surprise in narrative, and an original critique of grammatical description in literary studies. It draws on an unusually broad range of disciplines to offer the first theoretical account of the future anterior as a grammatical, critical and philosophical concept.