Professor Mark Currie (Queen Mary) presents his paper, ‘Memory in the Future Tense’ at the Future of Memory Symposium on the 30th October 2011.

Narrative is often thought of as one method by which we recapitulate past experience, and we think of its default tense structures as retrospective. This paper advances a claim that narrative temporality operates according to a tense structure more closely related to the future perfect, the tense that refers to something that lies ahead and yet which is already complete. There is a hint of the impossible in the future perfect. It seems to ascribe to the future the one property that it cannot possess. The modelling of time in narrative, it is argued, is centred on this impossibility, of a future that has already taken place, and the temporality that it generates tells us something about how we use stories to reconcile that we expect with what we experience.

Dr. Sebastian Groes (University of Roehampton) presents his paper at the Future of Memory Symposium, 29th October 2011, entitled ‘Memory after Postmodernism: Confabulation and the Event in Speculative Realist Fiction’.

With the ahistorical, inauthentic amnesic as a key figure, postmodernity first celebrated, and then mourned, tropes of liberation and loss, triggering a retrenchment in nostalgia and melancholy. It the early twenty-first century, writers are returning to obsessions that lay at the heart of modernism: time, memory, and consciousness refracted by a renewed, forward-looking ‘reality hunger’ and the hangover of a century of increasing epistemological uncertainty. I will be juxtaposing the work of Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes with that of Tom McCarthy’s speculative realist fiction (Remainder (2006) in particular), to suggest that control over the event via controlled acts of memory are doomed to fail. McCarthy’s fiction stretches the possibilities of memory as and in fiction to new limits to deflate and thwart the sense-making processes.

Professor Joanna Bryson (University of Bath) delivers a talk at the Future of Memory Symposium, on the 29th October 2011, looking at memory from the perspective of biology and cognition.