contingency & literary criticism

Two of the recent intellectual subfields I find especially interesting--possible worlds in philosophy and counterfactuals in history/historiography--are engaged in the same set of problems, problems surrounding the querying of contingency. Insofar as either of these subfields have influenced literary studies, it has been in terms of providing an ontology of fiction. Thinking of the novel as a sort of large-scale, messy thought experiment designed to test and reflect upon contingent truths is not unhelpful (though it presents serious challenges to mimesis, among other things; cf. Thomas Pavel, Fictional Worlds), but this approach works badly or not at all for other forms of literary art--poetry, say, or essays.

It would be more interesting, I think, to try to perform counterfactual analyses, and to try to arrive at a kind of awareness of contingency, within literary works themselves. We tend not to do this for very good reason: books present themselves as pure compounded necessity--but then, so does the past (whether everything that exists exists necessarily can be taken up in the comments section), and historians are less shy about trying to arrive at historical rules through manipulation of the contingent.

Literary critics do, of course, do this to some extent through the measurement of individual texts against generic or aesthetic rules; if done in an especially systematic way, we arrive at something like Franco Moretti's studies. This sort of method, at its best, often tends toward a sociology of literary history, which suggests that the study contingency and necessity comes to literary criticism by way of history (including genre history and so forth). What I would like to think about, and what I would like your views on, is whether we can come up with a way of thinking about the contingent on the level of the individual work or author. My exceedingly modest proposal is to consciously contrast (pretended) first and multiple readings of a work--or perhaps, the reading in time with the timeless (I don't mean, of course, the critic's own first reading of a text, but the imaginary first-reading perspective that critics adopt when pointing out 'the reader does not yet know X' and so forth). Critics often shift between these modes, but I rarely see the contrast noted explicitly or used as a methodological tool; this contrast is one way, I think, of generating a heuristic sense of contingency. I do hope, however, you can come up with something a bit less modest than this--and I will likewise endeavor.