New Publication and Keynote Address from Professor Brian Richardson

The article appears in the current issue of Conradiana.

Professor Brian Richardson's article, " 'All His Life Seemed to Rush into That Hand’: The Poetics and Erotics of Touch in Conrad’s Fiction,” appears in the current issue of Conradiana.

Last week, he gave a keynote address, “Plotting against Probability,” at the "Impossible Fictions" conference of the International Society for Fiction and Fictionality Studies at the University of Chicago. In this talk, Richardson  reflected on the concept of probability in fiction and the lack of a corresponding notion of improbable fiction. He discussed ways that contradiction is theorized in narrative poetics, both at the local level and at the level of fictional worlds. The talk concluded with an analysis of multiversion narratives – that is, ones in which, unknown to the characters, many of the same key scenes, events, and settings are repeated and varied.

The talk was presented as part of the Second International Congress of the International Society for Fiction and Fictionality Studies / Société internationale des recherches sur la fiction et la fictionnalité (ISFFS/SIRFF), sponsored by the Possible and Impossible Fictions research project at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, the France Chicago Center, the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, and the Institut Universitaire de France.