Litshop presents, Milan Terlunen “Plot Twist! Reading, Narrative and the Art of Surprise”

Abstract: A woman is courted by a charming man, only to discover that all along he was engaged to another woman. Another woman loses her friend’s diamond necklace and takes on ruinous debt to secretly replace it, only to discover that all along the necklace was cheap costume jewelry. A man tries to help a young boy haunted by ghosts, only to discover that he himself was a ghost all along.

Whether or not you recognize these scenarios as Jane Austen’s novel Emma, Guy de Maupassant’s short story “The Necklace” and M. Night Shyamalan’s movie The Sixth Sense, twist narratives are so widespread that you no doubt recognize the device. The plot twist is a particularly artful surprise which retroactively transforms our understanding of what came before (“all along…!”). As such, the plot twist complicates standard scholarly ways of understanding reading, knowledge and time.

For this LitShop I’d like to take you on a whirlwind tour of my work on the history and theory of plot twists. The project began life as my dissertation, and I’m now intending to transform it into a scholarly monograph, an accessible short book for non-academic readers and perhaps a podcast series. I’d value everyone’s thoughts on how this research can speak to the questions and interests of a wide range of fields and disciplines. Will there be a twist at the end of my talk? Only one way to find out…

Bio: Milan Terlunen is (for just a few months longer) a Postdoctoral Associate in Literature at MIT. His first book project, The Pre-History of the Plot Twist in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, studies readers’ experiences of surprise and retrospection alongside the development of the publishing and media industries. He is also planning a short, accessible book titled How Plot Twists Work. His broader interests include the history of narrative, literary theory, digital humanities and public humanities, especially podcasting. He is the host and co-creator of the podcast How To Read, a co-founder of the Humanities Podcast Network and a co-editor of the forthcoming Palgrave Handbook of Humanities Podcasting.

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