In the first two volumes of this work, Paul Ricoeur examined the relations between time and narrative in historical writing, fiction, and theories of literature. This final volume, a comprehensive reexamination and synthesis of the ideas developed in volumes 1 and 2, stands as Ricoeur's most complete and satisfying presentation of his own philosophy.

Time and Narrative

To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent-absent or, as in some domains of contemporary Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a panglobal fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late (and already profoundly missed) Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself. . international, transhistorical, transcultural."' Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that

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The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality

Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence — from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, Judith Lewis Herman. New York: Basic Books, 1992. 276 pp. $27.00. ISBN 0-465-08765–5.Shattered Assumptions: Toward A New Psychology of Trauma, Ronnie Janoff-Bulman. New York: The Free Press, 1992, 256 pp. $24.95. ISBN 0-02-916015–4.

Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence — from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act

Time and narrative

Theorists of narrative have been divided into those who conceive of narrative primarily as a cognitive instrument for imposing meaningful order onto the real and those who consider it to be primarily an ontological category that characterizes the human way of being in the world, that is, something constitutive of human existence. These can be called respectively the epistemological and ontological position on the significance of narrative for human existence. Galen Strawson, in turn, has made an influential distinction between descriptive and normative positions on the narrativity of experience. In this essay, I suggest that even though these conceptual differentiations are helpful to a certain extent, such binary terms may also prevent us from paying adequate attention to complex interconnections between the ontological, epistemological, and ethical dimension of the relation between narrative and human existence. I argue that the question of the significance of narrative for human existence can be formulated with an emphasis on any of these philosophical dimensions but that the answers involve implicit assumptions concerning all three dimensions. In the debate on narrative and human existence, particularly undertheorized has been the role of tacit ontological assumptions concerning what is counted as real. In disentangling the debate, I argue that both experience and narrative are phenomena constituted by interpretative activity; while it is important not to conflate experience and narrative, it can be meaningfully said that narrative interpretations of experiences have a constitutive role in our existence. By looking at how certain novelists have dealt with this problematic, the essay also suggests how to tie the theoretical study of narrative more intimately to the study of the philosophical underpinnings of narrative forms in literary history.

Narrative and Human Existence: Ontology, Epistemology, and Ethics

Th is essay off ers two readings of its title. One takes the words understanding, narrative, and hermeneutics as nouns that stand for diff erent though interrelated notions; the other proposes an understanding of hermeneutics as an approach to human reality in which narrative plays a crucial role. Th e fi rst reading could be said to be concerned with three distinct notions and their overlap and interplay, being aware that each term is unfolded in a broader tradition of its own. Th ere are, for example, more forms and practices of human understanding and meaningmaking than those we call narrative; there is more to narrative than that it enacts processes of understanding; and hermeneutics is a fi eld of inquiry that reaches beyond not only processes of narrative understanding but also beyond processes of understanding in general (acknowledging the border zones and limits of understanding). It is with this in mind that we want to point out that, and show how, the hermeneutic approach explores in-

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Understanding Narrative Hermeneutics

The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible

1. Introduction PART I 2. Textual Labyrinths: Robbe-Grillet's Antinarrative Formalism 3. The Epistemology and Ontology of Antinarrativism 4. Ethics of Antinarrativity in the Post-War Context PART II 5. Re-Engagement with the World: Towards an Aesthetics of Dialogical Intertextuality 6. Narrative Hermeneutics and Dialogical Subjectivity 7. Ethics of Storytelling: History, Power, Otherness 8. Conclusion Bibliography Index

Hanna Meretoja

Papers

Narrative and Human Existence: Ontology, Epistemology, and Ethics

Understanding Narrative Hermeneutics

The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible

The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory: The Crisis and Return of Storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma