Abstract Narrative thinking has a very important role in our ordinary everyday lives?in our thinking about fiction, about the historical past, about how things might have been, and about our own past and our plans for the future. In this paper, which is part of a larger project, I will be focusing on just one kind of narrative thinking: the kind that we sometimes engage in when we think about, evaluate, and respond emotionally to, our own past lives from a (...) perspective that is external to the remembered events. Being able to do this is an essential part of what it is to have a narrative sense of self. Sometimes, I will suggest, we fail to have such responses?we are not able to think and feel as we should about an episode in our lives. On such occasions, there is a gap in our narrative sense of self?a gap which opens up especially where the past is in some sense tragic or traumatic. The desire to close this gap is what I will call a desire for emotional closure. (shrink)

We propose to analyze well-known cases of "imaginative resistance" from the philosophical literature (Gendler, Walton, Weatherson) as involving the inference that particular content should be attributed to either: (i) a character rather than the narrator or, (ii) an unreliable, irrational, opinionated, and/or morally deviant "first person" narrator who was originally perceived to be a typical impersonal, omniscient, "effaced" narrator. We model the latter type of attribution in terms of two independently motivated linguistic mechanisms: accommodation of a discourse referent (Lewis, Stalnaker, (...) Kamp) and 'cautious' updating as a model of non-cooperative information exchange (Eckardt). (shrink)

Raquel Cascales and Luis Echarte focus on the development of practical wisdom and what they call ‘seeing with the heart’ for science students by means of reading science fiction literature. They argue that literature can bring the student into contact with the reality of moral life as moral dilemmas are made concrete by the characters and circumstances in a novel. They provide an analysis of how Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World can be read in the classroom and show how the (...) novel invites students to think about the role of science in society, the evolutionary paradigm, advances in genetic and psychological manipulation, as well as questions concerning human emotions,suffering, and friendship. (shrink)

"En una entrevista que le hice al escritor mexicano Luis Arturo Ramos a mediados de los años ochenta, le pregunté sobre su interés en Cortázar. Al plantear esta pregunta, noté una reacción física negativa, como si la mera mención del autor argentino fuera ofensiva o tal vez un ataque. Y su respuesta verbal fue parecida, negando de forma contundente cualquier presencia de Cortázar; no seguí más esa línea de preguntas y cambiamos de tema...".

“Place” as an argumentative domain, which has been taken for granted and treated by theorists of argumentation simply as a physical notion designating the occasion where an argumentation takes place, carries far more complex meanings beyond its traditionally assumed domain in the following three dimensions: as a geographical locale; as a concept, an idea, a history or a notion with its own disputable narratives and presumptions; and as an imaginative geography. Similarly, an image or a character projected through argumentative discourse (...) should be among the central concerns for argumentation studies, however, limited attention has nevertheless been paid to this traditional face of argument in general and the collective face in particular. We argue that image is a site of discursive production, a symbolic field or a discursively disputable space. The discursive interplay among “place,” “image,” “argument” and “time” offer a new way of thinking about ethotic argument and its key role in the establishment of discursive credibility. (shrink)

“Place” as an argumentative domain, which has been taken for granted and treated by theorists of argumentation simply as a physical notion designating the occasion where an argumentation takes place, carries far more complex meanings beyond its traditionally assumed domain in the following three dimensions: as a geographical locale; as a concept, an idea, a history or a notion with its own disputable narratives and presumptions; and as an imaginative geography. Similarly, an image or a character projected through argumentative discourse (...) should be among the central concerns for argumentation studies, however, limited attention has nevertheless been paid to this traditional face of argument in general and the collective face in particular. We argue that image is a site of discursive production, a symbolic field or a discursively disputable space. The discursive interplay among “place,” “image,” “argument” and “time” offer a new way of thinking about ethotic argument and its key role in the establishment of discursive credibility. (shrink)

I propose a minimal account of authorship that specifies the fundamental nature of the author-relation and its minimal domain composition in terms of a three-place causal-intentional relation holding between agents and sort-relative works. I contrast my account with the minimal account tacitly held by most authorship theories, which is a two-place relation holding between agents and works simpliciter. I claim that only my view can ground productive and informative principled distincitons between collective production and collective authorship.

The approach is by a winding road about nine miles long, boldly cut out of the rock … the road comes to an end in front of a long underground passage leading into the mountain, enclosed by a heavy double door of bronze. At the far end of the underground passage a wide lift, panelled with sheets of copper, awaits the visitor. Through a vertical shaft of 330 feet cut right through the rock, it rises up to the level of (...) the Chancellor's [Hider's] dwelling place. Here is reached the astonishing climax. The visitor finds himself in a strong and massive building containing a gallery with Roman pillars, an immense circular hall with windows all around … It gives the impression of being suspended in space … The whole, bathed in the twilight of the autumn evening is grandiose, wild, almost hallucinating. The visitor wonders whether he is awake or dreaming. (shrink)

This article surveys the current debate among analytic philosophers and film narratologists about the logic and phenomenology of cinematic narration. Particular attention is given to the question of whether every film that represents a fictional narrative also represents a narrator's fictional narration.

This paper presents and discusses Simon Evnine’s hylomorphic account of fictional characters and proposes some amendments to it with the aim of explaining the functioning of fictional characters. The paper does so by relying on a case study, viz. Edgar Allan Poe’s short story Berenice. The amended hylomorphic account of fictional characters will also be capable of explaining the malfunctioning of fictional characters.

In the past few decades, a growing number of philosophers have tried to explain the phenomenon of imaginative resistance, or why readers often resist the invitation of authors to imagine morally deviant fictional scenarios. In this paper, I critically assess a recent proposal to explain IR in terms of a failure of empathy, and present a novel explanation. I do so by drawing on Peter Goldie’s narrative account of empathic perspective-taking, which curiously has so far been neglected in the IR-literature. (...) I argue that, in some cases, IR is due to a partial confusion of two kinds of imaginative perspective-taking towards a fictional character: an internal, genuinely empathic, perspective-taking, on the one hand, and an external, crypto-empathic, stance that can be characterized as in-her-shoes-imagining, on the other. I argue that, in the cases at issue, IR is not so much a resistance to imagining but, rather, to empathically enacting an evildoer’s moral and phenomenal first-person perspective. I conclude by considering some more general lessons that follow from my account for what has recently been called sadistic empathy and point to an unresolved issue for future thinking about IR. (shrink)

Defining “criticism” is a simple—but bedeviling—task. No less a critic and theorist than Edwin Black begins with the simple statement that “criticism is what critics do.” While he admits that this seems like an empty definition, Black does note that it has one redeeming feature—“It compels us to focus on the critic” (1978, 4). Criticism and those who engage in it are integrally connected, and any account of critical activity must deal with both the activity and its actor. In this (...) way, it is much like art—one could easily utter that “art is what artists do.” Criticism is often tied to art and its products, so this appears to be a fair way to proceed in an investigation of criticism. Yet I would argue .. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that readers will resist imagining that a character in a story did something morally wrong, even if the story endorses this judgement. This paper argues, first, that readers will not resist if the question of whether that act was wrong is not salient as they read; and, second, that asking a certain question can be part of correctly appreciating a story—even if that question is not in the foreground of the story, and even if the story (...) itself discourages readers from asking it, as is common in some forms of the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. (shrink)

The _play of formulas_ is a new theory designed to explain the manner in which discourses (Suttas, Sūtras) were composed in the early Buddhist tradition, focusing at present mainly on the _Dīgha-_ and _Majjhima- Nikāyas_ (the collections of the Buddha’s Long and Middle-length discourses). This theory combats the commonly accepted views that texts are mainly an attempt to record and preserve the Buddha’s teachings and life events, and that the best way to understand their history is to compare parallel versions (...) of them. By identifying the creative, mainly the literary, vectors alive in the shaping of the texts, the theory explains how discourses are the products of formulas, which themselves are the primary texts of early Buddhism. Formulas combine in order to produce meaningful textual patterns, with little account of historical context and with much interest in aesthetic appeal and emotive potency. Formulas connect according to set narrative designs, in which different types of audiences are represented not only through unique formulas, but also with their specific narrative trajectories and complementing doctrinal emphases. It is not that the early authors were not at all interested in safeguarding the tradition. It is only that there was much more going on, and that thinking about the texts in this way misses their entertaining faces and ignores their beauty. These probably tell us more about what the early discourses actually were for the people that first produced and studied them than dry philosophical doctrine. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the consideration the problem of the phenomenon of an unreliable narration in the British intellectual prose of the second half of the twentieth century. The meaning of the words “narrator”, “unreliable narration” is investigated. The unreliable narration is reviewed based on the example of the novel “Rites of Passage” by Golding. It is noted that the aforementioned work has a vibrant didactic component. It has been found that Golding uses a wide range of narrative techniques. (...) The emphasis is made on the critical analysis by other literary scholars of the novel “Rites of Passage” by Golding. The use of narrative strategies in accordance with the scientific classification by Genette is investigated. The markers of unreliability of the narrators are emphasized. Attention is focused on the fact that a high degree of unreliability is based on the limited knowledge of the heroes, direct participation in the events, a problematic system of values. It is noted that the unreliability of narration in the novel “Rites of Passage” by Golding forces the reader to doubt not only the narrator but oneself. The use of the narrative method in the intellectual prose of the British writer Iris Murdoch is investi-gated. It has been found that the novel “The Black Prince” by Iris Murdock is one of the best examples of an unreliable narration. The genre specifics of the novel are emphasized, which combines the forms of the diary, of the memoir and of the confession. In addition, Murdoch creates a narrative strategy, which combines signs of various forms of “I am the narrator” within the framework of one narrative. In addition, “The Black Prince” is a unique model of modern artistic and philosophical metatext genre formation. (shrink)

This article considers Catullus’ reaction to his brother’s death and argues that the poet, having found the masculine vocabulary of grief inadequate, turns to the more expansive emotions and prolonged dedication offered by mythological examples of feminine mourning. I begin by showing how Catullus complicates his graveside speech to his brother in poem 101 by invoking poems 65, 68a, and 68b. In these compositions, Catullus likens himself to figures such as Procne and Laodamia, and their feminine modes of grief become (...) associated with the poet. While these women’s grief brings them to a dreadful end, in my second reading of poem 101 I show how Catullus incorporates their emotional intensity and devoted attention into a masculine performance of mourning. Connecting his voyage to his brother’s grave with Odysseus’ journey, Catullus valorizes his single-minded remembrance of his sibling, even as he acknowledges that he will never overcome the distance between them. (shrink)

What is it for a person to have style? Philosophers working in action theory, ethics, and aesthetics are surprisingly quiet on this question. I begin by considering whether theories of artistic style shed any light on it. Many philosophers, artists, and art historians are attracted to some version of the view that artistic style is the expression of personality. I clarify this view and argue that it is implausible for both artistic style and, suitably modified, personal style. In fact, both (...) theories of style crack along the same line, which suggests that they can indeed be mutually illuminating. I articulate and defend a view of personal style according to which, roughly, having style is a matter of expressing one’s ideals. I show how this illuminates the widely neglected value of personal style and propose a new, analogous theory of individual artistic style: artistic style is the expression of the ideals the artist has for her art. (shrink)

This study analyzed 328 single- and group-authored stories composed by nine 4-year-olds in a mixed-age preschool class participating in a peer-oriented storytelling and story-acting practice. Group-authored stories were overwhelmingly told by same-gender groups. The frequencies, developmental trajectories, and functions of group-authored stories were different for girls and boys. Girls told mostly group-authored stories in the fall and single-authored stories in the spring. Group-authoring provided ‘brain-storming sessions’ for narrative experimentation; these stories were longer, with more dramatic problems and more sophisticated character (...) portrayals. By the spring, girls’ single-authored stories also included these features, suggesting internalized narrative gains. Boys consistently preferred single-authored stories, though in the spring the frequency and quality of their group-authored stories increased. These were longer, with more sophisticated character portrayals, than single-authored stories. Group-authored stories made a distinctive contribution to narrative development, partly by helping boys and girls overcome limitations of their preferred narrative genres. (shrink)

Coherence is a term of art in both epistemology and literary criticism, and in both contexts judgments of coherence carry evaluative significance. However, whereas the epistemic use of the term picks out a property of belief sets, the literary use can pick out properties of various elements of a literary work, including its plot, characters, and style. For this reason, some have claimed that literary critics are not concerned with the same concept of coherence as epistemologists. In this article I (...) argue against this claim. Although various nonepistemic notions of coherence figure in literary criticism, the epistemic concept has a mirror image in the literary–critical concept of thematic coherence. Moreover, evidence from literary criticism suggests that thematic coherence can be valuable from a literary-evaluative standpoint because it can be valuable from an epistemic standpoint, in particular by enhancing the credibility of a work's themes or author. My analysis of the notion of thematic coherence thus provides novel support for literary cognitivism, the view that a work's literary-aesthetic merits can depend on its epistemic merits. (shrink)

But that which remains the poets have founded.In contemporary rhetorical theory, the relationship between rhetoric and art tends to be articulated in terms of aesthetics. This increasingly popular discourse on “aesthetic rhetoric,” however, is characterized by a remarkable diversity. The rhetoric of fiction, poetry, and other literary genres, for example, has been explored in these terms (e.g., Booth 1983), as has the rhetoric of film (Haskins 2003), photography (Hariman and Lucaites 2007), and even natural landscapes (Clark 2004). From a different (...) perspective, aesthetics has been distilled to a range of “features” or “elements” that a given text is said to possess. Nathan Crick and Jeremy Engels, for example .. (shrink)

The article treats verbal irony in the poetry of two emblematic Estonian poets, Heiti Talvik and Betti Alver. The texts analysed are from the 1930s. Following the example of many scholars of irony, I have distinguished between two basic types of irony: verbal irony and situational irony. The first departs from the traditional definition of irony (saying one thing and meaning the contrary) and centres on the use of language, on certain verbal and stylistic devices that make the receiver of (...) the text perceive it as ironic. Situational irony refers to the recognition of the coexistence of incompatible opposites, to the feeling of the most absurd unexpectedness. The aim of the article is to locate and explain the functioning mechanisms of this verbal device in the poetry of Heiti Talvik and Betti Alver. First, there are ironies based on antonyms and/or on the negation of predication, which can be categorized as instances of classic rhetorical irony. We find in Talvik’s and Alver’s poetry few metaphors that can be explained as simple ironic metaphors (L is said but metaphorically N is meant, which in turn must be changed to its opposite value to reach the final referent N ->M=~N). Metonymy has a great inherent potential for irony: if the whole is represented by one of its parts, this often produces a mocking effect, which is the basic characteristic of irony. One can identify a particular kind of ironic metonymy in Talvik’s and Alver’s poetry when proper names (such as Casanova or Jeanne d’Arc) are used to indicate certain traits (the art of living and courage), while actually meaning the opposite (triviality and cowardice). Similar to the first group of classic irony are those instances where ironic oppositions between what is said and what is meant are not based on antonyms but rather on the difference between the highest, the most valuable level, of the imaginable scale and the zero point; for example, what is said is noble, but what is meant is ridiculous. In Alver’s poetry, there are texts that imply antonymic ironic oppositions (pastpresent, local-foreign, sensibility-reflection) but it is not possible to decide for either pole, since ambivalence remains. Well known among scholars of irony, Dan Sperber’s and Deirdre Wilson’s theory of irony as a type of mention is superbly applicable to instances interpreted as ironic in Talvik’s and Alver’s poetry. As Sperber and Wilson have explained, “use of an expression involves reference to what the expression refers, mention of an expression involves reference to the expression itself” (Sperber, Wilson 1981: 303); in the case of irony, the speaker produces a phrase, hinting at the same time that it is improper, ridiculous or in some other way unsuitable to the situation. The theory of irony as a type of mention fits well with Oswald Ducrot’s theory of the polyphony of language, which distinguishes between the speaker (locuteur) and the enunciator (énonciateur). In ordinary discourse, these often coincide, but irony is one of the cases in which the speaker produces statements that he himself does not believe in. In Alver’s and Talvik’s poetry, there are many instances of irony which can best be explained as the mention of an opinion held by another which is unacceptable to the speaker himself. Quite similar to irony as a type of mention is ironic role play in which the speaker is clearly not identifiable with the implied author, since the role taken is opposed to the standpoint of the implied author. Talvik’s and Alver’s poetry does not contain pure role play but only elements of it. (shrink)

This paper proposes an understanding of literary narrative as a form of social cognition and situates the study of such narratives in relation to the new comprehensive approach to human cognition, enaction. The particular form of enactive cognition that narrative understanding is proposed to depend on is that of participatory sense-making, as developed in the work of Di Paolo and De Jaegher. Currently there is no consensus as to what makes a good literary narrative, how it is understood, and why (...) it plays such an irreplaceable role in human experience. The proposal thus identifies a gap in the existing research on narrative by describing narrative as a form of intersubjective process of sense-making between two agents, a teller and a reader. It argues that making sense of narrative literature is an interactional process of co-constructing a story-world with a narrator. Such an understanding of narrative makes a decisive break with both text-centered approaches that have dominated both structuralist and early cognitivist study of narrative, as well as pragmatic communicative ones that view narrative as a form of linguistic implicature. The interactive experience that narrative affords and necessitates at the same time, I argue, serves to highlight the active yet cooperative and communal nature of human sociality, expressed in the many forms than human beings interact in, including literary ones. (shrink)

I take a pragmatic approach to what interpreters do when they interpret and argue that critical pluralists have focused almost exclusively on one aspect of interpretation: the fact that it is an event taking place in a historical and cultural milieu that influences the many ways interpreters approach a given text. However, there is also in interpretation a pragmatic aspect: the fact that it is an act performed by individuals who, through the utterance of their statements, implicitly make claims, for (...) example, regarding the truth of their interpretation. In the first part I explain what critical pluralists overlook and the consequences of such oversight. In the second part I indicate how the validity of interpretation can be assessed. (shrink)

I discuss two ways one may explain how we interpret the content of a fictional. In the first, the interpreter’s task aims at deciding what is true in a fictional story by figuring out the narrative intentions behind its production. Narrative interpretation is a matter of figuring out the story-telling intentions of the (implied) author of the work. This is Currie’s intentionalist model of narrative interpretation, a conception I present and discuss on the basis of experimental results in the psychology (...) of language. In the second, narrative interpretation is explained by reference to the emotions of the reader or the viewer of the fictional narrative. It is on the basis of his emotional sensibility, of how things feel to him that the reader or the viewer is led to understand the narrated events. This is Velleman’s emotional theory of narrative understanding. Finally, I compare both conceptions. (shrink)

(1988). Approaches, opportunities and priorities in the rhetoric of political inquiry: A critical synthesis. Social Epistemology: Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 21-42.

[Translator's]: The flight of Voyager 1 past Saturn in 1981 provides an occasion for a semiotic comparison of reports in French newspapers, a popular science article, and specialized scientific articles in Nature. The texts differ in the distance supposed between reader and writer, in the treatment of human and nonhuman actors, in characterization of the event and assumptions about readers' interest in it, and in their narrative structure. The analysis shows that popular izations and specialized scientific articles are not related (...) in a simple dichotomy or scale and cannot be explained by a notion of the "general public"; rather, the various types of texts must be considered in terms of more complex relations between what are called in semiotic terms the enunciator and the enunciatee. (shrink)

Escritura creativa es un término que apela a diversas posibilidades educativas y formativas a través del medio de la escritura. Para su realización concreta recurre a recursos y orientaciones procedentes de diversos saberes y disciplinas. Nuestra propuesta es acotar uno de estos significados de la escritura creativa y presentar su relación con la retórica, disciplina que puede aportar elementos significativos a los fines formativos de la escritura creativa, tal como la hemos acotado. Para esta acotación del significado narraremos primero brevemente (...) la historia de su constitución, y a continuación su finalidad como realidad formativa. Sobre la base de esta finalidad delimitaremos a grandes rasgos la disciplina de la retórica y presentaremos sus posibles aportaciones a la escritura creativa. (shrink)

Leo Tolstoy was on to behavioral ethics before there was such as a thing as behavioral ethics. Three scenes from his magnum opus, War and Peace, demonstrate that Tolstoy diagnosed some of the same problems that occupy modern behavioral ethics: confirmation bias, slippery-slope reasoning, and illusions of control. However, whereas modern behavioral ethics has done more to diagnose problems than to prescribe solutions, Tolstoy’s theories of moral psychology and leadership provide direction for human moral self-cultivation. This analysis of War and (...) Peace also suggests that literary fiction can depict worlds at least as fertile as the real world for studying business ethics. Building upon this example, in an age and field which seems too often to prioritize scientific wisdom over that of the humanities, I speculate about how literary fiction can expand our research into more diverse actors and worlds of modern capitalism. (shrink)

Novels like Fight Club or American Psycho are said to be instances of unreliable narration: the first person narrator presents an evidently distorted picture of the fictional world. The film adaptations of these novels are likewise said to involve unreliable narration. I resist this extension of the term ‘unreliable narration’ to film. My argument for this rests on the observation that unreliable narration requires a personal narrator while film typically involves an impersonal narrator. The kind of ambiguous story-telling that we (...) find in literary fiction with unreliable narrators, where for certain descriptions it is unclear whether what we’re told is an accurate account of what’s happening in the story world or not, can instead be achieved by conventionalized filmmaking techniques for reporting the contents of mental states, like the point of view shot, but especially the more ambiguous blended perspective shot. (shrink)

: Although philosophers often focus on the essays of Leopold's Sand County Almanac, especially "The Land Ethic," there is also a normative argument present in the stories that comprise most of the book. In fact the shack stories may be more persuasive, with a subtlety and complexity not available in his prose piece. This paper develops a narrative ethics methodology gleaned from rhetoric theory, and current interest in narrative ethics among literary theorists, in order to discern the normative underpinnings of (...) the stories in Part 1. The narrative ethics approach sidesteps the need to ground the land ethic in ethical theory—which has been a reconstructive and problematic task for the philosophical interpreters of Leopold—and suggests, instead, that it emerges in Leopold's very effort to narrate his, professional, personal, and practical experience with nature. The involves examining the stories in terms of their emotional, logical and performative aspects. The result is an analysis that shows not only how these stories express normative claims, but also justify them. One conclusion of the analyses is that, in the narratives, there is less emphasis on the problematic notion of an over-arching "community" than in the prose pieces, and more emphasis on the metaphor of other living things as "fellow travelers" in the "odyssey of evolution." Second, the narratives take on an ironic attitude toward the ecological order, less discernable in the prose essays. The order itself may not be ethically admirable, but should be preserved since it makes possible any ethical relations within it. Thus, the narrative reading suggests some temperance to the usual holistic interpretation of his land ethic and its concomitant criticisms especially the charge of ecofacism. We should not take the land ethic imperative at its face value, in the sense that the good of the order itself is an intrinsic good. In the narratives, individuals are shown not merely to be means to the ecological whole, but the focus of sympathy and concern, in a manner that demands their good should also be an object of moral consideration. (shrink)

In contemporary analytic philosophy of art, the intentionalist debate is about whether the author’s intention is relevant to the interpretation of her work. Various positions have been proposed, and in this paper I defend what I call hypothetical author-hypothetical intentionalism, the position that interpretation is based on the intention attributed to the author constructed from the work. There are three aims to achieve: (1) to give a general account of hypothetical author-hypothetical intentionalism; (2) to present a moderate version of hypothetical (...) author-hypothetical intentionalism; (3) to defend the moderate version of hypothetical author-hypothetical intentionalism against actual intentionalism and actual author-hypothetical intentionalism. Against the current trend that focuses on actual authors, I hope to show that the hypothetical author account is still a sustainable contender in the intentionalist debate. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that since artworks cannot take moral responsibility, it is impossible to establish any sort of ethical criticism towards them for their own sake. Ethical criticism of art is inevitably directed at the artist(s), who can take moral responsibility for creating or performing the art in certain ways. Therefore, we should distinguish between two types of criticism towards art: (1) the ethical criticism should be contextualized within the author-work framework, meaning that the extent to which the (...) author can take moral responsibility will significantly affect the ethical criticism of art, while artworks can serve as acts or evidence of acts (of the author) in ethical criticism; (2) ‘ethical’ criticism of art for the work’s own sake should be excluded from the ethical issue and instead reconstructed in the causal issue. (shrink)

In his discussions of life as narrative, and identity as narrative identity, Paul Ricoeur has claimed that we learn to become narrators and heroes of our own stories, without actually becoming the authors of our own lives. This idea, that we cannot be the author of our own life-story in the same way that the author of fictional narrative is the author of that story, seems at first incontestable, given that we are caught up within the enactment of the narrative (...) that is our life, unlike the author of a fictional story who also has an independent existence outside that story. This asymmetry leads Ricoeur to pronounce that an ineradicable difference exists between fictional and life narratives. But is this difference in fact ineffaceable, or is there a sense in which we can be said to be the authors of our own lives? In this article I suggest that there are more points of similarity than Ricoeur explicitly recognizes between what authors do in writing fictional narratives and what we do in figuring, prospectively, our lives. These similarities are brought to light by a revision of the naïve, received concept of author and, once acknowledged, serve to bridge the purportedly ‘unbridgeable gap’ between fictional narratives and life narratives. I then consider how bridging this gap — establishing ourselves as authors as well as narrators — has ethical implications with regard to creating our own lives: a creation which authoring implies, but which is — given the revised notion of author — limited, both by the reciprocity of the other as co-author and by those events in life which the life-author is not fully able to plot. (shrink)

The idea of narrative has been widely discussed in the recent health care literature, including nursing, and has been portrayed as a resource for both clinical work and research studies. However, the use of the term 'narrative' is inconsistent, and various assumptions are made about the nature (and functions) of narrative: narrative as a naive account of events; narrative as the source of 'subjective truth'; narrative as intrinsically fictional; and narrative as a mode of explanation. All these assumptions have left (...) their mark on the nursing literature, and all of them (in our view) are misconceived. Here, we argue that a failure to distinguish between 'narrative' and 'story' is partly responsible for these misconceptions, and we offer an analysis that shows why the distinction between them is essential. In doing so, we borrow the concept of 'narrativity' from literary criticism. Narrativity is something that a text has degrees of, and our proposal is that the elements of narrativity can be 'sorted' roughly into a continuum, at the 'high narrativity' end of which we find 'story'. On our account, 'story' is an interweaving of plot and character, whose organization is designed to elicit a certain emotional response from the reader, while 'narrative' refers to the sequence of events and the (claimed) causal connections between them. We suggest that it is important not to confuse the emotional persuasiveness of the 'story' with the objective accuracy of the 'narrative', and to this end we recommend what might be called 'narrative vigilance'. There is nothing intrinsically authentic, or sacrosanct, or emancipatory, or paradigmatic about narrative itself, even though the recent health care literature has had a marked tendency to romanticize it. (shrink)

Although philosophers often focus on the essays of Leopold's Sand County Almanac, especially "The Land Ethic," there is also a normative argument present in the stories that comprise most of the book. In fact the shack stories may be more persuasive, with a subtlety and complexity not available in his prose piece. This paper develops a narrative ethics methodology gleaned from rhetoric theory, and current interest in narrative ethics among literary theorists, in order to discern the normative underpinnings of the (...) stories in Part 1. The narrative ethics approach sidesteps the need to ground the land ethic in ethical theory—which has been a reconstructive and problematic task for the philosophical interpreters of Leopold—and suggests, instead, that it emerges in Leopold's very effort to narrate his, professional, personal, and practical experience with nature. The involves examining the stories in terms of their emotional, logical and performative aspects. The result is an analysis that shows not only how these stories express normative claims, but also justify them. One conclusion of the analyses is that, in the narratives, there is less emphasis on the problematic notion of an over-arching "community" than in the prose pieces, and more emphasis on the metaphor of other living things as "fellow travelers" in the "odyssey of evolution." Second, the narratives take on an ironic attitude toward the ecological order, less discernable in the prose essays. The order itself may not be ethically admirable, but should be preserved since it makes possible any ethical relations within it. Thus, the narrative reading suggests some temperance to the usual holistic interpretation of his land ethic and its concomitant criticisms especially the charge of ecofacism. We should not take the land ethic imperative at its face value, in the sense that the good of the order itself is an intrinsic good. In the narratives, individuals are shown not merely to be means to the ecological whole, but the focus of sympathy and concern, in a manner that demands their good should also be an object of moral consideration. (shrink)

This article discusses the relationship (or lack thereof) between authors’ intentions and the meaning of literary works. It considers the advantages and disadvantages of Extreme and Modest Actual Intentionalism, Conventionalism, and two versions of Hypothetical Intentionalism, and discusses the role that one’s theoretical commitments about the robustness of linguistic conventions and the publicity of literary works should play in determining which view one accepts.

It seems that we are not willing to give up the intuitions that works of fiction are free from the constraints of historical truth and historical inaccuracies sometimes count against the artistic value of works of fiction. Christopher Bartel calls this the puzzle of historical criticism. I argue that this puzzle extends beyond historical facts. While it is especially salient that historical accuracy at times appears relevant to the evaluation of fictional works, such relevance appears to be a feature of (...) facts in general. I then propose a partial strategy for resolving the puzzle. (shrink)

(1995). Innovation and change in the production of knowledge. Social Epistemology: Vol. 9, Knowledge (EX) Change, pp. 211-232. doi: 10.1080/02691729508578789.

In attempting to answer whether Nabokov’s Lolita can be described as an unethical novel, the author ponders on what basis one could make such a determination. At (1) the author analyzes the merited-response argument offered by Gaut (and previously Hume and Carroll), which provides a conceptual framework for the resolution of the controversy surrounding Lolita. Based on this analysis, (2) the author decides what constitutes the novel’s ethical foundation and what (3) prescriptions and (4) responses can follow from it.