Like any knowledge discourse, literary theory is built against chance. Be it when identifying structural constants, elaborating meaning, elucidating values or defining ontologies, the theoretical effort normally aims to account for—thereby reducing and/or eliminating—the contingent part of the literary phenomena it deals with. The measure of critical theories accuracy, their ability to describe their objects in a complete and relevant way, is to what extent they can tell the essential from the accidental, and separate the significant and regular features of a work or genre from what could simply be described as “noise.” Similarly, the normative force that turns a critical discourse into a theory in its own right is supposed to rest upon its capacity to set rules, again against the apparent tendency toward disorder, unpredictability and the proliferation of the texts, practices and literary phenomena that it seeks to order.

From this point of view, theoretical discourses related to contemporary comparative studies (literary cultural theory, subaltern studies, gender studies, post-colonial, and cross-media approaches, etc.) would prove more capable than other fields of literary reflection to manage the role played by chance in the behavior of literary phenomena. Whether explicitly anti-universalist or not, they are always specifically formulated to account for dynamic and evolving variation, flexion and relativity phenomena. As such, they do address the text’s openness to the world, the shifting of boundaries, the diversity of the work’s production modes, and the mobile relationships that exist between communities and artistic configurations.

However, even while contemporary comparative theory tends to replace universalisms or binarisms with new approaches to literary matters that are more attentive to the instability and variety of their actual occurrences, it often seems to radicalize the effort to eliminate chance, common to all knowledge discourses, precisely because of the effort it makes to uncover regular or necessary processes in a material that is, by definition, hard to encompass and in constant reconfiguration. Such a movement is also present in Digital Humanities’ empirical and post-theoretical approaches, which aim to search for regularities and overwhelm individual variations in distant readings: as Alexandre Gefen points out in his contribution to this issue, the stochastic and statistical approaches seem to be as merciless towards chance as theoretical categorizations.

And yet the validity of a theory depends as much on its ability to account for the random dimension of the phenomena it deals with as on its ability to formulate the norms and rules that govern them. In the specific case of literary theory, this is particularly essential, since this requirement applies not only to its object, but also to the presentation itself and to the way one relates to the other.

As for the object, first of all, we know that “no work of art deserves this name as long as it distances itself from anything contingent to its own law”: Theodor Adorno’s maximFootnote 1 features prominently in several of the contributions brought together here. How, then, can literary theory account for the literary—in other words, explain, as Roman Jakobson defined it, what makes a verbal message a work of art—without taking into account its essential dimension, namely its dependence on chance? Chance intervenes at every level there: in the intention that produces it, in the artistic gesture that creates it, in the ever-shifting configuration of its parts, in the frailty of its material support, in the diversity of its interpretations, and finally in its subsequent “fortune.” Hence, literary theory can neither describe the reality of literary practices and achievements, nor propose any kind of hermeneutics for them, nor a fortiori formulate their norms, without first addressing the particular tension—between contingency and necessity, exception and rule, irrationality and rationality—resulting from each. Moreover, while chance is an essential element in the emergence of the literary work as a unique or unprecedented singularity, it also contributes to the appearance, constitution or dissolution of groups of works (genres, forms, series) and to the evolution of literary movements (trends, practices, configurations). It must therefore also be factored into the historicization of poetic categories—one of literary theory main purposes.

Since Köhler’s (1973) seminal work Der literarische Zufall, das Mögliche und die Notwendigkeit, a growing number of studies have focused on the various crises that have marked the history of chance figures in literature since early modern times, and that, overall, historically determine the successive regimes for managing randomness in literary theory (Duprat et al., 2024; Duprat & James, 2024). As regards the history of the forms that literary theory has taken as a knowledge discourse, clearly the evolution of its proposals on chance in literature is directly linked to the changes in the closest adjacent knowledge fields, in each of the periods concerned.

Accordingly, as regards early modernity studies, it is the theological and political discourse on chance that undoubtedly stands out as the dominant perspective providing a basis for understanding the involvement of chance/randomness in the theatre, games, short story collections and poetry of the Renaissance and early Baroque periods, as shown by the impressive collective work dedicated by the University of Tours CESR to changes in the idea of Fortune during this key period in its history (Demonet, 2007). Subsequently, Lyons (2011) was able to highlight the crucial role chance continued to play in the literary forms emblematic of Louis-Quatorzain classicism (tragedy, the novel), even though the seventeenth-century normative idealist poetics hallmark seemed designed to eliminate it from a literary canon then in the making.

Chance’s resilience, its ability to outlast in the artistic and literary field the disappearance of the epistemic terrains that had spawned it and to transform itself there, sometimes anticipating the onset of other ideological contexts, takes on even greater relevance from the eighteenth century onwards. Evidence of this can indeed be found in the many critical essays on chance in novels published in England and America between 1990 and 2010. They largely result from the grafting of Ian Hacking’s theses on the emergence of mathematical and economic probability in the eighteenth century onto the critical tradition of linking the rise of British novelistic realism to the contemporary rise of capitalism and the advent of the industrial revolution (Daston, 1995; Hacking, 1975, 1990). Meiner (2008) shows, at the intersection of material history and the history of novelistic forms, how the horse-drawn carriage, a characteristic feature of the action progression system in seventeenth- to nineteenth-century French and English novels, epitomizes the play of contingency in the novelistic dynamics specific to the French novel from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. The studies conducted by Kavanagh (1993), Vogt and Brendecke (2017), Patey (1984) and Molesworth (2010) likewise belong to this vein, insofar as they spot, in the development of the novel, the testing ground, the reflection or, conversely, the reaction of the imaginary to the economic logic specific to the capitalist enterprise and the understanding of reality it is based on, from the domestication of chance—which marked the beginning of the statistical era in 1830—to the society of forecasting which followed it after the First World War (Puskar, 2012).

From the 1920s onwards, the scientific paradigm took precedence over the economic one in the main literary theories produced on the subject of chance in literature—technological thought acting as a distinct transition between the two. The coincidence between the development of quantum mathematics and physics, and then chaos theories, on the one hand, and the emergence of Surrealist poetics using random or combinatorial devices on the other, has given rise to numerous studies favoring an epistemological or metaphysical approach to literature. These are formulated in particular on the basis of readings of Stéphane Mallarmé’s poetry (Meillassoux, 2011; Monginot, 2015), or on the modern British novel (Jordan, 2010) and later, of course, on the work of the Oulipo, and the proponents of the anti-chance “littérature à contrainte” such as Italo Calvino, Raymond Queneau, Julio Cortazar and Georges Perec (James, 2009).

Finally, unsurprisingly, it is the cybernetic paradigm, communication theory, and artificial intelligence discourse that have dominated the main theories regarding the relationship between chance and literary creation over the last thirty years. The evolution of narratological theories on the role played by contingency in narrative is a case in point, from the studies dedicated by Richardson (1997) or Currie (2013) to causality in narrative, which started from a classical apprehension of the novel’s management of chance, to the theses of Walsh and Stepney (2018) or Pier (2017), who now suggest considering the narrative itself as a complex system, via the rise of cognitivist approaches to narrative probability (Kukkonen, 2019).

However, the historical succession of epistemological paradigms that are brought to bear in the critical treatment of chance in literature does not leave the very form of the presentation unscathed, nor the way its authors view its epistemological ambition. Such contamination of discourse on poesis by its object is, of course, particularly clear in the forms of criticism which in reaction to the sterilizing seriousness of academic thought have embraced various forms since the sixteenth century: be they creative (epistolary digression, flânerie, romantic critical reverie, the literary essay), fictionalized (imaginary biography, narrative or performance interpretation), metaphorical (post-structuralist philosophical and semiotic criticism) or performative (surrealist poetic and artistic manifestos, critical performances). Yet, chance also intervenes in the composition of scientific presentation, even as it seeks to establish the distance from its object that is necessary for its institution as a knowledge discourse. The knowledge produced by theory is developed precisely in the same tension between contingency and necessity that marks the literary phenomena it addresses.

The following submissions focus on that dialectic, and on an analysis of the effects produced by theory’s awkward management of the fundamental contingency that weakens its object at the same time as it constitutes it. Although theoretical discourse has not always tried to repress this element of randomness/chance it inherently holds—on the contrary, its capacity to mimic its object’s creativity and to borrow its poetic force from it can make the propositions it formulates more convincing and more intuitive—it never manifests itself without disturbing its argumentative and rational structure. At a time when literary theory’s ability to account for the complexity of literary phenomena is going through one of the most striking crises in its history, due to competition from the much more efficient mining of large-scale textual data by artificial intelligence (as demonstrated by Alexandre Gefen), we might wonder whether it is not that very sensitivity of literary theory to the random, the irrational and the unpredictable that might actually enable it to resist this challenge.

Hence the propositions that emerge from the eight studies presented here. They tend to show how several theoretical discourses—from the Constance school to Derrida’s post-structuralism (Stefan Willer), and from the various Marxist thoughts on socialist realism (Susanne Strätling, Maya Kesrouany) down to recent cognitivist approaches to the literary (Karin Kukkonen)—have been able to manage their difficult relationship with chance/the random to the point of making it productive.

To achieve this, analysis must begin by distinguishing real chance—i.e., the random dimension of real-life events—from chance as produced and managed by literary works, particularly fictional narratives, insofar as the attempt to theorize literary forms hinges on the articulation of the two. This is what Robert Stockhammer shows, based on Agamben’s (2015) reflection on the notion of adventure and on the performative coincidence that the novel would achieve between chance as a type of real event and as a narrative model. While ultimately proposing to qualify this coincidence, Stockhammer describes its real efficacy in successive theses of the novel, from Hegel to Mikhail Bakhtin.

In theories of literature based on a philosophy of language, this examination of adventure as the very form of discourse of and about poetry takes on particular force. While criticism, when it sets itself up as a theory, is supposed to move from description to explanation, from subjective impression to a rational interpretation that is, if not universal, at least sharable, and from the analysis of particular places to a hermeneutic capable of drawing out that overall meaning of the work that will go beyond the one that emerges from each of its parts, this theory nevertheless unfolds in the same linguistic milieu as the object it deals with. Acknowledging this commonality means not only reflecting on the randomness of language, but also acknowledging the essential role played by chance in the very process of reflection: the adventure of discourse is also, and always will be, the adventure of thought, and beyond that the hectic voyage of the philosopher’s life. What the philosopher formalizes in his discourse on the literary is his own relationship with chance, insofar as it molds the construction of his thought over time. Robert Young’s comparison of Walter Benjamin’s and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s contrasting itineraries, both profoundly influenced by their respective relationships to gambling, risk and uncertainty, speaks volumes here. By tracing the ways in which both, in lives marked—tragically in the case of Benjamin, who died in 1940 while trying to escape deportation by the Nazis—by spectacular interventions of chance, were able come to terms with uncertainty to the point of modifying the accepted forms of philosophical exposition, to come closer to the freer poetics of the essay as theorized by Adorno (1991, v. 2, pp. 322–337) at the time, Young himself models his discourse accordingly. His article makes the most of the semantics of these interventions of fate, punctuating his interpretation of each philosopher’s journeys with expressions that organize both their intellectual itineraries and their reconstruction: “as it happens...” and “it was [his] good or perhaps bad luck...”.

Similarly, Stefan Willer explores the inevitable arbitrariness involved in the interpreter’s choice of particular parts and places on which to base his construction of the work’s overall meaning—why should one passage be more representative, more significant, more authentically emblematic of the whole that is to be reconstituted than another? Based on an examination of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, Wolfgang Iser’s reception aesthetics and the dialogue between John R. Searle and Jacques Derrida on the practice of quoting each other’s arguments in debates between philosophers and critics, Willer shows that this methodological contingency itself, as such, contributes to the meaning of the theoretical approach. While both polemics and systematic exposition often involve concealing (to oneself as well, sometimes) or minimizing what theory owes to chance, creative criticism, on the other hand, promotes its epistemological interest and highlights it as a mark of the theory’s relevance to its object. Karin Kukkonnen’s study thus showcases the practice of novelists and critical writers such as Italo Calvino and, more recently, Gwenaëlle Aubry, of including in their theoretical presentations the very processes of random composition (drawing lots for words or cards) that their discourses aim to analyze.

The deliberate use of chance in discourse has the advantage of bringing the presentation, the literary work it analyses and the phenomena it represents down to the same level of reality: subject to the same regime of emergence of the event, they are articulated in the same way, as a series of occurrences, and it is this very symmetry the theory highlights. This coincidence, which lets creative forms of literary criticism mimic the free and erratic progress of their subject, can also help evolving literary forms theorists manage the difficult insertion of new or unforeseen phenomena into constraining ideological systems of thought about the relationship between reality, literature and society. This is shown by the studies devoted by Susanne Strätling and Maya Kesrouany to the promotion of chance in the contexts of two different historical achievements of socialist realism: Soviet realism in the 1930s and the new Arab realism in the 1950s. The major role attributed to contingency by Egyptian and Lebanese critics Mahmud Amin al-ʿAlim and Husayn Muruwwah is particularly significant in this regard. While its consideration makes it possible to reconcile, in the study of the actual development of new Arab realism in Egypt and Lebanon, the inevitable existence—and actual productivity among writers—of a subjective vision of the world with the collective imperative of rationally representing it in its material totality, Kesrouany suggests it also enables the theorist himself to integrate the unpredictable emergence of new forms of writing, as Arab literatures develop, into an intellectual construct whose vocation is to promote the advent of a fully socialist society. By reopening the possibilities of the theoretical program that underpins this political project, and by enabling it to retrospectively predict the appearance of these forms, chance allows it to remain historically valid.

Beyond this tactical use of chance—which enables literary theory as well as the physical and mathematical sciences to use it as a flexible epistemic ‘joint’ to reconcile programs, languages and phenomena that are in principle incompatible—it is its haptic use, relating to touch, that gets Susanne Strätling’s attention. The philosopher and mathematician Yakov Druskin’s original attempt to propose a “law of heterogeneity” based on contact and proximity as non-totalizing yet effective means of accessing reality highlights the model that “con-tingence”—etymologically, the fact that phenomena touch each other, that they are freely juxtaposed rather than linked together by necessity—can represent for the conception of literary theory. By abandoning its attempt to fix the shifting diversity of the phenomena it studies in an all-encompassing and dominant vision (theorein), literary theory could then focus more productively on giving an account of their actual sensitive organization, by sharing the characteristics of their material presentation. By contrast, the study devoted by ** poetic works of everything that makes them alive in its efforts to abstract them, may ironically find its latest justification here.