Research Catalog

Title

The ethics of storytelling : narrative hermeneutics, history, and the possible / Hanna Meretoja.

Author

Meretoja, Hanna, 1977-

Publication

• New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2018]
• ©2018

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xii, 352 pages; 25 cm

Summary

• " Against 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. "--
• "This book provides a theoretical-analytical framework for a hermeneutic narrative ethics, which articulates the ethical potential and risks of narrative practices. It analyzes how narratives shape our sense of the possible by enlarging and diminishing the dialogic spaces of possibilities in which we act, think, and re-imagine the world"--

Series Statement

Explorations in narrative psychology

Uniform Title

Explorations in narrative psychology.

Subject

• Storytelling
• Narration (Rhetoric) > Moral and ethical aspects
• Narration (Rhetoric) > Psychological aspects
• Narration (Rhetoric) > Social aspects
• Self-perception in literature
• Social perception in literature
• Awareness in literature
• Imagination in literature
• PSYCHOLOGY / Social Psychology
• PHILOSOPHY / Mind & Body
• LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 309-331) and index.

Contents

1. Introduction: Towards an Ethics of Storytelling -- 2. Narrative Hermeneutics -- 3. Storytelling and Ethics -- 4. The Uses and Abuses of Narrative for Life: Julia Franck's Die Mittagsfrau -- 5. Narrative Ethics of Implication: Günter Grass and Historical Imagination -- 6. Narrative Dynamics, Perspective-Taking, and Engagement: Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes -- 7. Transforming Narrative In-Betweens: Dialogic Storytelling in David Grossman's To the End of the Land and Falling Out of Time -- 8. Conclusion: Struggles Over the Possible.

Call Number

JFE 18-2330

ISBN

• 9780190649364
• 0190649364

LCCN

2017028106

OCLC

1002653675

Author

Meretoja, Hanna, 1977- author.

Title

The ethics of storytelling : narrative hermeneutics, history, and the possible / Hanna Meretoja.

Publisher

New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2018]

Copyright Date

©2018

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Series

Explorations in narrative psychology

Explorations in narrative psychology.

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages 309-331) and index.

Research Call Number

JFE 18-2330