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Professor Mark Currie, MA (Aberdeen), PhD (Cambridge)
Professor of Contemporary Literature

Tel: +44 (0)20 7882 8572

Email: m.currie@qmul.ac.uk

Research interests:

• Theory of Narrative
• Philosophy of Time
• Contemporary Fiction
• Literary and Cultural Theory

Mark Currie’s research focuses on the theory of narrative, and particularly on the description of temporal structures in narrative and fiction. He is the author of Postmodern Narrative Theory (Palgrave 1998; Second Edition 2011), Difference (Routledge 2004) and About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time (Edinburgh University Press, 2007), and the editor of Metafiction (Longman, 1995). His work explores questions about the relationship of fictional narrative to critical, linguistic, social, cultural and philosophical knowledge, and his recent work has consistently addressed questions about tense and time in writing. He is interested in supervising postgraduate work that engages with the theory of narrative, narratology, twentieth-century and contemporary fiction, and with contemporary literary and cultural theory in general.

He is currently working on a book about unexpected events in fiction and in life, about the way that narrative is disposed towards the representation of unexpected turns, and the way that narratology has understood and failed to understand issues of anticipation, expectation and future orientation in the reading process. The book is also an assessment of the state of contemporary narrative theory and its efforts to describe narrative temporality in diverse contexts such as cognitive narratology and phenomenology.

Before joining the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary in 2010, Mark was Professor of Contemporary Writing at the University of East Anglia, Professor of English at Anglia Ruskin University, Head of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster, Lecturer in English at the University of Dundee and Adjunct Professor at the University of Syracuse. He is from Edinburgh.

Publications:

About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time  Edinburgh University Press, 2007.

Difference The New Critical Idiom. Routledge, 2004.

Postmodern Narrative Theory (Second Edition) Macmillan/Palgrave, 2011. Forthcoming.

Metafiction  Longman, Longman Critical Readers series.  (London and New York, Longman, 1995). Edited with an introductory essay.

‘Universals’ in Glossalalia Edinburgh University Press, 2003. 

‘Encounters with Structuralism and the Invention of Poststructuralism in the United States’ in Modern North American Criticism and Theory ed. J. Wolfreys. Edinburgh University Press, 2006.

‘The End of Difference’ in The Condition of the Subject ed. Philip Martin. Palgrave, 2006

‘Controlling Time: the Proleptic Past Perfect in Ishiguro’s Never Let me Go’ in Kazuo Ishiguro ed. Matthews and Groes London and New York: Continuum, 2009 pp. 91-103.

‘The Expansion of Tense’ Narrative (Special Edition: Narrative Temporalities) Volume 17, No 3, October 2009, pp. 353-367.

‘The Novel and the Moving Now’ Novel: a Forum on Fiction Volume 42 Number 2, Summer 2009, pp. 318-326.

‘Stuck in Time: Feminism and Futurity’ Textual Practice, Spring 2010.

Review Article Bryony Randall Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life, Novel: a Forum on Fiction, Summer 2010.