Mood and Narrative Entwinement: Some Implications for Educational Practice (original) (raw)
Related papers
Existential Feeling and Narrative
Funktionen des Lebendingen, 2016
This paper is a tentative exploration of the relationship between existential feeling and narrative, with an emphasis on how the two interrelate in psychiatric illness. By 'existential feeling', I mean a felt sense of being rooted in a shared world, which shapes all experience and thought. This is something that I have described at length in several other works (e.g. . The term 'narrative' is used in many different ways. Here, I restrict myself to explicit autobiographical narratives of whatever length, which relate life events in meaningful, chronologically structured ways. I focus upon those narratives that incorporate explicit descriptions of firstperson experience, but the majority do not. Some of what I say here concerns only the former, but my main points, which are made in Sections 4 and 5, apply more generally.
Narrative as a Means of Creating an Identity for Ourselves and Others
Synthesis Philosophica, 2011
The need to narrate is according to P. Ricœur the very core of creating the knowledge of self. The process of identification through narration does not lead us to be focused on our own narration. We always find other people’s narrations first and then start telling the narration of our life. Through narration, as understood by Ricœur, we can simultaneously learn ethics as well as morals. To show this the author compares philosophic view of identity by Ricœur with Frisch’s literary experiment in the novel I’m Not Stiller. Both of them are a hermeneutic intertwining that brings to natural identity. In this hermeneutic process we can rediscover ourselves in a world, in which we will respect our own identity by being fully open to its creative transformation.
The Inextricability of Understanding and Affectivity and the Narrative Identity Circle
Talk at the Copenhagen Summer School in Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind, 2017
One of the phenomenological characteristics of irrationality is the disconnection between judgement and affective states, which points out to a breakdown of the normativity of the practical sense-making engagement with the world. How can we gain a better understanding of the interplay between affectivity and practical reason? I propose to think of them as two co-constitutive modes of disclosing the world, informing practical sense-making engagement (which I also refer to as world-relatedness). I call this the inextricability thesis. A version of it is put forward by Heidegger. First, I carry out a reading of Being and Time focusing on affectivity [Befindlichkeit] and understanding [Verstehen]. Their concrete manifestations, affective states and interpretation, are revelatory, respectively, about our ‘having-been’ [Gewesenheit] (experiences insofar as they affected present dispositions, behaviour, character, etc.) and ‘potentiality-for-being’ [Seinkönnen] (ability to realise oneself in existential projects). Together, they shape ‘circumspection’ [Umsicht], i.e. the sense-making engagement with the world. I suggest speaking of ‘affective-interpreting world-relatedness’ and in order to sketch out a conception of it derived from Heidegger, the broader frame of his account of subjectivity must be examined. Self- and world-understanding belong to the subject’s – the Dasein’s – ontological structure and mutually inform each other; in understanding the world, affective-interpreting world-relatedness follows what Heidegger calls the ‘for-the-sake-of’ [Umwillen]. I take this concept to refer to practical measures that point to an implicit commitment, i.e. an ‘implicit self-understanding’ practically acted out in how we make sense of the world. I develop this as a conception of weak narrative identity derived from Ricoeur. My main thesis brings implicit self-understanding and affective-interpreting world-directness together. World-directness in the present holds past and future — as mediated by the two disclosing modes, affectivity and understanding — together in a meaningful coherence. The three time modes mutually affect each other, but sense-making in the present grants for unity, as practical instantiation of implicit self-understanding. On the other side, new, transformative experiences have the potential to reverberate back on self-understanding, eliciting changes.
Many theorists have argued that the meaningfulness of a life is related in some way to the narrative or story that can be told about that life. Relationists claim that a life gains in meaning when a particular set of " narrative relations " obtain between the events that constitute it. Recountists claim that it is the telling of a story about those relations, not the relations themselves, that confers meaning. After identifying problems with existing versions of both of these positions, this paper introduces a new and more satisfying variant of Recountism, centered on the old-fashioned idea that a meaningful life is, in part, an intelligible one. I argue that personal narration does play a role in a meaningful life and that my " Fitting Story " account provides the best explanation of how and why that is so.
From the point of view of hermeneutic psychology, the self is a product of action and of representation, with narratives of the self as a major representational and structuring principle. In this sense reality is interwoven with narrative fictions. Experimental fictions and reflexive narratives are therefore a prime cognitive instrument in the development of complex structures of self-identity and subjetivity.
" Life as Narrative " Revisited
Jerome Bruner is undoubtedly one of the most influential and debated narrative theorists in cultural studies and an important figure in the exchange of ideas between literature, cultural studies, and psychology. Recently (2002; 2008), his work on narrative cognition and " folk psychology " (1990) has gained new vitality in David Herman's work (2002; 2008); whereas Galen Strawson (2004: 428–46) has foregrounded Brun-er's thought by targeting him, among others, in his own criticism of nar-rativity. The purpose of this article is not to evaluate either the whole debate or Bruner's whole contribution to cultural psychology or narrative theory but to study one single article, " Life as Narrative " (Bruner 1987), and especially one of its key arguments. I want to try out the idea that this article, far from expressing some permanent core of Bruner's thought, remains a rare exception and largely unendorsed in Bruner's later work. More specifically, I shall claim, first, that Bruner's position within " the metaphoric discourse on narrative " (which interprets human life, experience , action, identity, or self as narrative) is not nearly as unambiguous as the title of the article might imply and, second, that Bruner's later work does not endorse but rather challenges the radical thesis, according to which telling autobiographical stories and experiencing the world through these stories allows us to " become the narratives by which we 'tell about' our lives " (Bruner 1987: 15). Above all, his later thoughts on the play of folk psychological " canonicity " and its " breach " in actual narratives challenge the easy continuity between life and narrative. Narrative as a metaphor for life has been a vital part of theorizing narrative in social research at least since Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue (1984 [1981]). There is no modesty or hesitation in MacIntyre's famous argument that it is " because we all live out narratives in our lives and because we understand our own lives in terms of the narratives that we live out that the form of narrative is appropriate for understanding the * This article is part of my larger project on the conceptual history of narrative, funded by the Academy of Finland. I am grateful to Lisa Muszynski and my reviewers for excellent and helpful comments.
On Narrative Identity and Truth of the Self
Humanities Bulletin, 2022
The following paper offers an account of Paul Ricoeur's "narrative identity" which proposes that the identity of human persons (or selves) is constituted through narratives about oneself. This account of personal identity is then further formulated through replies to the main objection raised against it, namely, that narrative identity reveals a division in the self: it shows there must be-the objectors argue-a more originary experiential self prior to the self-interpreted narrative self. The replies to the objection offer, first, with the help of Jan Patočka's conception of "movement", a way to conceive a kind of being that is constituted through its self-narration; secondly, with the help of Judith Butler, a way to understanding how an apparent division in the self when one lies about oneself is bridged in an understanding of our own human limitations and fragility.
Narrative emotions and the shaping(s) of identity: Guest Editor’s Introduction
2014
, participants were convinced of the need to further explore the connections between these issues across the multiple forms of contemporary narrative. Though much has been written about narrative identity, this collection of essays privileges its possibilities from the perspective of theories of emotions. The following articles refer both to the ways in which emotions are represented in narratives, as well as how these representations assume a reader's emotional competence, dwelling on the numerous ways in which narrative empathy is enhanced. Through close readings of different contemporary narratives, this special issue illustrates the advantages of narrative in the portrayal of emotions: Emotions are, unlike language, non-linear, imprecise, unstructured and diffuse. Therefore language is an inadequate medium to represent emotions, and "telling," that is, putting a simple label on an emotional state, is less engaging than "showing" by a wide register of narrative means available to fiction. (Nikolajeva, 2014, p. 95)