The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the PossibleAgainst the backdrop of the polarized debate on the ethical significance of storytelling, Hanna Meretoja's The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible develops a nuanced framework for exploring the ethical complexity of the roles narratives play in our lives. Focusing on how narratives enlarge and diminish the spaces of possibilities in which we act, think, and re-imagine the world together with others, this book proposes a theoretical-analytical framework for engaging with both the ethical potential and risks of storytelling. Further, it elaborates a narrative hermeneutics that treats narratives as culturally mediated practices of (re)interpreting experiences and articulates how narratives can be oppressive, empowering, or both. It also argues that the relationship between narrative unconscious and narrative imagination shapes our sense of the possible. In her book, Meretoja develops a hermeneutic narrative ethics that differentiates between six dimensions of the ethical potential of storytelling: the power of narratives to cultivate our sense of the possible; to contribute to individual and cultural self-understanding; to enable understanding other lives non-subsumptively in their singularity; to transform the narrative in-betweens that bind people together; to develop our perspective-awareness and capacity for perspective-taking; and to function as a form of ethical inquiry. This book addresses our implication in violent histories and argues that it is as dialogic storytellers, fundamentally vulnerable and dependent on one another, that we become who we are: both as individuals and communities. The Ethics of Storytelling seamlessly incorporates narrative ethics, literary narrative studies, narrative psychology, narrative philosophy, and cultural memory studies. It contributes to contemporary interdisciplinary narrative studies by developing narrative hermeneutics as a philosophically rigorous, historically sensitive, and analytically subtle approach to the ethical stakes of the debate on the narrative dimension of human existence. |
Contents
| 1 | |
2 Narrative Hermeneutics | 43 |
3 Storytelling and Ethics | 89 |
Julia Francks Die Mittagsfrau | 149 |
Günter Grass and Historical Imagination | 179 |
Jonathan Littells Les Bienveillantes | 217 |
Dialogic Storytelling and David Grossman | 255 |
Struggles over the Possible | 299 |
| 309 | |
| 333 | |
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Common terms and phrases
acknowledge actions affective argues aspects autobiographical Avram become Bienveillantes Brockmeier Chapter characters Colin Davis conception critical cultural narratives Danzig trilogy dialogic storytelling dimension empathy emphasizes engage ethical potential experience explore Franck function Gadamer German Grass Grossman Günter Grass Häuten der Zwiebel Helene historical world Holocaust human implicated intersubjective Les Bienveillantes linked literary narratives literature Littell lives means mediated memory Meretoja mode moral agency narration narrative ethics narrative fiction narrative hermeneutics narrative identity narrative imagination narrative interpretation narrative models narrative practices narrative psychology narrative therapy narrative unconscious narrative webs narratology Nazi Nazi Germany Nazism novel Ofer one’s ontological oriented ourselves past perpetrator person perspective philosophical present problematic rative reader reflection reinterpretation relation relationship Ricoeur rience rytelling Second World War sense sense-making shape shared situation social space of possibilities stories structure subjects subsumptive suggests tell temporal process tion tive transformed trauma understanding University Press violence