The unforeseeable is an idea alien in many ways to literary experience. More obviously, prose fiction deploys foreseeable plots, genres, and formats that make its events appear easier to predict than ones in real life. The fixity of the book, the fact that narration occurs so often in the past tense, and the ways in which the historical past appear so often in fiction all collude to suggest that the novel sees its own future coming.

Yet there are other ways in which prose fiction remains unforeseeable, and still more in which it allows us to engage with the least predictable aspects of our reality. The last year has made the mystery of the future all too palpable. But it has also suggested the power of narrative to contend constructively with our experience of not knowing, or being in a position to predict, what is to come. In many ways, 2020 has allowed us to seize on accident, plot twist, and the unforeseeable as essential to the stories we tell about the world and the subject’s place in it. The topic of The Unforeseeable allows us to continue conversations about our recent experiences in light of fiction’s long history of modelling and engaging us in situations we do not control.

Even before 2020, there was some interest amongst literary critics in the representation of accident (David Wylot, Reading Contingency; Ross, Accident:A Philosophical and Literary History; Mark Currie; The Unexpected). There has also been a recent turn in book and media theory to thinking about unanticipated or formal breakdowns and material strategies registering the unforeseeable at the level of the page. For example, Julia Jordan develops a new understanding of the role of the accidental and the indeterminate in experimental modernist literature. In new materialist philosophy, Catherine Malabou’s latest work on epigenesis, or the development of an organism through various stages, emphasizes the responsivity and plasticity of life itself in the face of unforeseen events. This panel brings these different approaches to the unforeseeable, the diegetic and the material, together.

The panel will consist of three closely related papers chosen to build towards a conversation of this kind. The first, “Repeat Reading as the Unforeseeable” by Emily Rohrbach (University of Durham), investigates how reading books for the second time sheds light on the unforeseeable as originating less in the plot than in the affective response and critical judgment of the reader toward a book one already knows. Rohrbach explores what might prompt the reader to say, “It’s not as good as I remembered it” or that it’s so much better. The book becomes in this argument less a stable object than an object-based process.

The second paper, “Unforeseeable Fascism: Richard Hughes’s Metahistorical Theory of the Novel in The Human Predicament,” by Adrienne Ghaly (University of Virginia), recuperates an unfinished novel by a little-known late modernist author to show how it innovatively conveys the unforeseen and unforeseeable nature of well-known historical events, in particular the rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s. Ghaly shows how Hughes conveys the sense of history as being created in an ever-renewing and wholly myopic now and considers the political implications of this project.

The third paper,“Genre Friction and the Unforeseeable” by Rebecca Evans (Southwestern University) explores the role of genre. Evans explores how contemporary U.S. fiction registers this tension between the foreseeable and the performance of unforeseeability through its formal experimentation with different genres. In particular, she shows writers in the 1990s producing “genre friction”—a phenomenon in which texts strategically establish and subvert the conventions of multiple genres—in order to narratively remap the unforeseeable in the context of health disparities.