Since the publication of Oneself as Another , many sociologists have referred to the work of Paul Ricœur, some of them considering his notion of narrative identity to be a useful means of analyzing some aspects individual identity left unresolved by Bourdieu’s notion of habitus . Bourdieu had, however, already discredited the sociological relevance of the notion of narrative in his 1986 article “The Biographical Illusion.” Through a careful re-reading of both texts, this article will determine to (...) what extent the sociological use of Ricœur’s notions can escape the confines of Bourdieu’s analysis and, moreover, the different conceptions of the human being and of ethics underlying the two distinct frameworks of analysis.  . (shrink)

Le Corbusier's visionary or realistic urban plans are accompanied by various experimental ways of presentation, all designed to involve the public and political authorities through spectacular installations that play on the dimension of illusionism. In his quest to present his urbanistic ideas, Le Corbusier uses dioramas, photographs and film projections. The aim of his staging is to modify the conventional vision of reality with a systematic bombardment of spectacular images.

Hope and the Longing for Utopia is Daniel Boscaljon’s second edited collection, following his earlier Resisting the Place of Belonging: Uncanny Homecomings in Religion, Narrative and the Arts and his solo-authored Vigilant Faith, both of which I am now very excited to read! A welcome contribution to the postsecular discourse on utopian studies in the twenty-first century, the twelve interdisciplinary essays contained in this volume achieve what its editor sets out in the introduction: “contribute toward a revitalized sense of (...) the potentiality of utopic thinking, one that grounds its hopes in an embrace of human fragility, failure and imperfection instead of... (shrink)

Both early and later forms of Buddhism developed a set of arguments to demonstrate that the self is an illusion. This article begins with a brief review of some of the arguments but then proceeds to show that these arguments are not themselves sufficient to dispel the illusion. It analyzes three ways in which the illusion of self manifests itself – as wish fulfillment, as a cognitive illusion, and as a phenomenal illusion. With respect to (...) this last, the article reviews some recent developments in cognitive neuropsychology and neuroscience to discuss the way in which the phenomenal illusion of self is encoded within our brain processes. This article also considers the way in which the illusion of self is constructed through social interaction, by episodic memory, and by narrative construction. Finally, it focuses on how the illusion of self developed as an evolutionary necessity to make it possible for the human organism to navigate physical and social reality; and that it continues to be useful today. This poses a dilemma for the Buddhist soteriological project of extinguishing the illusion of self. Specifically, while it is possible to develop a non-self perspective though the continued practice of vipassanā, it is not possible to maintain it consistently. The article concludes that even fully enlightened individuals must sometimes oscillate between a non-self perspective and a self-perspective and suggests an analogy between this oscillation and what occurs in the Kanizsa square illusion. (shrink)

As far back as we know, there have been individuals incapacitated by memories that have filled them with sadness and remorse, fright and horror, or a sense of irreparable loss. Only recently, however, have people tormented with such recollections been diagnosed as suffering from "post-traumatic stress disorder." Here Allan Young traces this malady, particularly as it is suffered by Vietnam veterans, to its beginnings in the emergence of ideas about the unconscious mind and to earlier manifestations of traumatic memory like (...) shell shock or traumatic hysteria. In Young's view, PTSD is not a timeless or universal phenomenon newly discovered. Rather, it is a "harmony of illusions," a cultural product gradually put together by the practices, technologies, and narratives with which it is diagnosed, studied, and treated and by the various interests, institutions, and moral arguments mobilizing these efforts. This book is part history and part ethnography, and it includes a detailed account of everyday life in the treatment of Vietnam veterans with PTSD. To illustrate his points, Young presents a number of fascinating transcripts of the group therapy and diagnostic sessions that he observed firsthand over a period of two years. Through his comments and the transcripts themselves, the reader becomes familiar with the individual hospital personnel and clients and their struggle to make sense of life after a tragic war. One observes that everyone on the unit is heavily invested in the PTSD diagnosis: boundaries between therapist and patient are as unclear as were the distinctions between victim and victimizer in the jungles of Southeast Asia. (shrink)

The Alexander Romance in Persia and the East. Edited by Richard Stoneman, Kyle Erickson, and Ian Netton. Ancient Narrative, vol. 15. Groningen: Barkhuis Publishing and Groningen University Library, 2012. Pp. xv + 416, illus. €95.40.

This long digression into language was necessary because we cannot understand verbal narrative unless we are aware of the iconic and indexical dimensions of language. Narrative is not just a sequencing, or the illusion of sequence, as the title of our conference would have it; narrative is a sequencing of something for somebody. To put anything into words is to sequence it, but to enumerate the parts of an automobile is not to narrate them, even though (...) the enumeration must mention each part in the enumeration's own discursive order. One cannot narrate a picture, or a person, or a building, or a tree, or a philosophy. Narration is a word that implicates its object in its meaning. Only one kind of thing can be narrated: a time-thing, or to use our normal word for it, an "event." And strictly speaking, we require more than one event before we recognize that we are in the presence of a narrative. And what is an event? A narrated event is the symbolization of a real event: a temporal icon. A narration is the symbolic presentation of a sequence of events connected by subject matter and related by time. Without temporal relation we have only a list. A telephone directory is a list, but we can give it a strong push in the direction of narrative by adding the word "begat" between the first and second entries and the words "who begat" after each successive entry until the end. This will resemble certain minimal religious narratives, even down to the exclusion of female names from most of the list . Robert Scholes is professor of English and comparative literature and director of the semiotics program at Brown University. He is the author of Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction, Fabulation and Metafiction, and Reading, Writing, and Semiotics. "Toward a Semiotics of Literature," his previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, appeared in the Autumn 1977 issue. (shrink)

In this article it will be argued that François Furet's attempt in Interpreting the French Revolution to provide a conceptual history of the French Revolution through a synthesis of Tocqueville and Cochin's historical and sociological accounts fails methodologically. It does so in two ways: Firstly, in its aim to distinguish between conceptual, explanatory history and empirical, narrative history, and secondly, in its distinction between revolution as process and revolution as act. Drawing on Claude Lefort and Paul Ricoeur's interventions in (...) the historiographical debate, I demonstrate that these seemingly methodological concerns, conceal a deeper historical and political question concerning the nature of the ‘event’ of revolution. In response to Furet's oblique turn to Hegel in his later work, this article traces the nature of the ‘conceptual inversion’ Furet claims to find in Hegel and Marx's accounts of the French Revolution. In relation to Marx, it is argued that Furet's critique fails to capture the allegorical nature of the political in Marx's thought, and underplays the significance of revolution as the basis for both the separation of the social and the political and their attempted unity. The article ends with some remarks on the importance of language and culture in rethinking the relationship between Hegel and Marx. (shrink)

Many mental phenomena involve thinking about people who do not exist. Imagined characters appear in planning, dreams, fantasizing, imaginary companions, bereavement hallucinations, auditory verbal hallucinations, and as characters created in fictional narratives by authors. Sometimes these imagined persons are felt to be completely under our control, as when one fantasizes about having a great time at a party. Other times, characters feel as though they are outside of our conscious control. Dream characters, for example, are experienced by dreamers as autonomous (...) entities, and often do things that frighten and surprise dreamers. Some imagined persons, such as characters in fiction, start off under conscious control of the author, but over time, can appear to gain an illusion of independent agency. I propose an explanation for different autonomy attributions: characters are by default non-autonomous, unless their personalities are well-practiced. Characters become autonomous because modeling their thinking has become automatized, like many other well-practiced activities. (shrink)

A thought experiment on the ultimate non-essence of Time.

This article provides a discussion of the limits of both narrative and culture based on a close textual analysis of the short story, “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk,” by Lorrie Moore. In this story, a mother describes her experiences on a pediatric oncology ward when her infant son develops Wilms' tumor. The authors examine how the story satirically portrays the spurious claims of language, story, and culture to protect us from an (...) unjust universe and then exposes their false promises. The various personal, professional, and genre-specific narratives we use to create order and coherence from the terror of serious illness are ultimately ineffective. Similarly, the superficially comforting culture of the hospital ward cares more about creating the illusion of control than it does about the suffering of sick children. Language and culture cannot make sense of human anguish, the article concludes, yet they are all we have to hold back the chaos. Mystery and uncertainty, as part of the human condition, must become part of our stories and part of our culture. (shrink)

People feel they understand complex phenomena with far greater precision, coherence, and depth than they really do; they are subject to an illusion—an illusion of explanatory depth. The illusion is far stronger for explanatory knowledge than many other kinds of knowledge, such as that for facts, procedures or narratives. The illusion for explanatory knowledge is most robust where the environment supports real‐time explanations with visible mechanisms. We demonstrate the illusion of depth with explanatory knowledge in (...) Studies 1–6. Then we show differences in overconfidence about knowledge across different knowledge domains in Studies 7–10. Finally, we explore the mechanisms behind the initial confidence and behind overconfidence in Studies 11 and 12, and discuss the implications of our findings for the roles of intuitive theories in concepts and cognition. (shrink)

The role of narrativity in the constitution of personal identity, a widely discussed topic in recent philosophy, is also an important issue in Robert Musil’s novel “The Man without Qualities.” Apart from a theoretical passage, where the coherence established by life-narratives is explicitly rejected as an illusion, the novel displays various instances of reflection in which characters seek to articulate their identity by narrating parts of their lives. Not all of these self-narratives are presented as flawed; rather, by highlighting (...) the differences between various instances of self-reflection, the novel suggests that a life-narrative has to meet certain standards in order to further self-understanding. The essay seeks to identify these standards by analysing two examples of self-reflection rendered in Musil’s novel. Furthermore, it briefly compares the novel’s dealing with the issue of narrativity and personal identity with recent philosophical approaches, in particular with Charles Taylor’s view that in order to have an identity, human beings have to understand their lives in the form of a narrative that determines their place relative to the good. (shrink)

Vedic Voices: Intimate Narratives of a Living Andhra Tradition. By David M. Knipe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xxii + 340, illus. $35.

Here, I defend the view that fictional narratives are illusionary and that fictional names are to be accounted metalinguistically, a blend of Walton’s and Donnellan’s theories. Besides, I offer a remedial semantic for sentences external to the story which connects those uses back to the text of the story and to the neighborhood of its retellings.

Here, I defend the view that fictional narratives are illusionary and that fictional names are to be accounted metalinguistically, a blend of Walton's and Donnellan's theories. Besides, I offer a remedial semantic for sentences external to the story which connects those uses back to the text of the story and to the neighborhood of its retellings.

The essays included in this special issue of Critical Inquiry are a product of the symposium on “Narrative: The Illusion of Sequence” held at the University of Chicago on 26-28 October 1979. The rather special character of this symposium was not fragmented into concurrent or competing sessions, and all the speakers remained throughout the entire weekend to discuss the papers of their fellow participants. Several distinguished participants, in fact, did not read papers but confined their contributions to the (...) conversations which developed over the several sessions of the three-day program. The impact of these sustained discussions is reflected in the revisions which the authors made in preparing their papers for this special issue, and thus this collection is a “product” of the symposium in a fairly precise sense. (shrink)

This inquiry examines various philosophical conceptions of identity and the clash between different identity narratives in the history of philosophy. The main goal of this paper is to show how the European philosophical idea of identity was developed. This paper explores the emergence of European philosophical identity narratives, which have shaped the ideas of justice, truth and community in Europe. It studies the foundational identity narratives that underlie the contested idea of a shared European heritage in law and culture, such (...) as the ideas of equality, tolerance, rule of law, pluralism and the rejection of totalitarianism, and their relevance for current debates on philosophical ideas of self and identity. Identity is an open process. It is a dynamic hermeneutic category, which is constantly reinterpreted and reinvented. There are various philosophical traditions of Cogito – some of them perceive it as foundation of all knowledge and some of them perceive it as a mere illusion. In all these philosophical perspectives, the self is understood only through interpretation. The self is constituted as a narrative, as a text. Understanding oneself means understanding oneself in front of a text. The self is reinterpreted all over again only in light of narratives provided by culture. The task of hermeneutics is not only understanding of a subject, but also rethinking the subject. (shrink)

This study analyses a Christic vision perceived by a woman during a radiotherapy session for her cervical cancer. A detailed description of the vision is presented based on a photographic documentation of the radiotherapy room, a painting of the vision made by the visionary herself and narratives retold two weeks after the vision, and again, one year later. Perceptual, social, and psychodynamic psychological theories are used to analyze the psychological prerequisites of the vision. It is shown that the vision is, (...) in psychological terms, an illusion rather than a hallucination. Different possible origin mechanisms to the vision are discussed as well as why the vision is attributed to Jesus. The psychological function of the vision is analyzed with regard to the visionary’s religious behaviour and the role of this experience in coping with the cancer disease. It is argued that the visionary’s religious commitment is being strengthened and that the vision functions as a catalyst for previously-formed religious coping mechanisms. It also initiates at least one new kind of religious coping mechanism in the visionary’s coping system. A critical discussion of research methods concerning narratives of religious experiences is presented in the light of the results of the analyses undertaken in this paper where some problems with in-depth interviews conducted at one point in time are is highlighted. This kind of data collection appears more fragile when attempting to explain a phenomenon in terms of cause and events than when trying to understand a phenomenon. (shrink)

This research explores the character’s decline in Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus. It tells the story of an intellect entitled Dr. Faustus who, after becoming dissatisfied with every piece of the experience he has accumulated, goes to see the devils to satisfy his ambition of becoming a supreme being. Evaluating the reasons behind his demise is the focus of this research. This research is qualitative in nature. The Baum proposal for this type of study serves as the foundation for the (...) investigation’s methodology used in this analysis. The fall from grace concept is based on Sinclair’s argument that a specific individual or system’s collapse or catastrophe occurs after they have recently achieved happiness or influence. The conclusion reveals that Faustus’s failure to discriminate between the real world and his fantasies, uncontrolled necromantic action, and overwhelming yearning is what ultimately lead to his disaster and condemnation. In the end, it is revealed that while Faustus initially appears to be the unfortunate protagonist of the narrative, he encounters the death he deserves. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Parables of Narrative ImaginingDavid Herman (bio)Mark Turner. The Literary Mind. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.The literary mind? The literary mind? The literary mind? Any which way you parse it, the title of Mark Turner’s provocative, elegantly written study seems to beg important questions, assume things that do not by any means go without saying. First parse: is there in fact a literary (part of the) mind? That is, is (...) there some nondiscrete but semi-autonomous module of cognitive capacities required for using and understanding literary discourse—a module that takes information (as its input) from other modules, operates on that information in some way, then feeds the transformed information (as its output: “literature”) into yet other modules, which in turn take that information as their input? 1 Second parse: assume that there is some module involved in the production and interpretation of literary discourse. Then of what nature, exactly, are the operations performed within that module, and how do they operate on the input in a way that makes the output specifically literary? How precisely is literature born from this process or set of processes? Doesn’t this kind of account suffer from all the disadvantages (inexplicitness, for example) that it inherits from its parent model, the black-box explanation? Third parse: should we even be talking about “minds” at all in connection with literature and the study of literature? Hasn’t “The Intentional Fallacy” and everything that has happened since in the fields of critical and cultural theory—from Marxism and poststructuralism to New Historicism and cultural studies—taught us to center critico-theoretical discourse anywhere but in “the mind”? Hasn’t all this research exposed the mind (of the author, reader, subject, or postsubject, as the case may be) as a construct with more or less noxious political and cultural properties? Are not the discourses of and about the mind so many strategies of interpellation—vehicles by which ideology can work to implant the illusions of inviolable inwardness, unchanging essence, and predetermined identity within a subject that takes such imagined realities to be its real conditions of existence? 2Turner does not directly address any of these questions—at least in the way that I have framed them. That may be grounds for criticism: if you are using a title that can be construed as polemical, then the onus is on you to explain just how the title positions your work in a wider context of argumentation. But at the same time, Turner’s analysis reformulates the underlying problems to which some of my questions point, thus raising [End Page 20] other, equally important issues. Coming to terms with these other issues may change the way we ask questions about things like literature and the mind. Specifically, as part of a larger “cognitive revolution” now unfolding in social-scientific and humanistic disciplines ranging from linguistics to literary and narrative theory, Turner’s book provides ample reasons for not thinking the idea of mind tantamount to an ideology of mind. 3 After all, reducing mind to an ideology of inwardness leaves unexplained any number of basic facts about perception, cognition, and language processing. There is, for example, our ability to use “image schemata” such as motion along a path and bounded interior to make sense of events like milk being poured into a cup, on the one hand, and contained spaces like the ones inside bottles, heads, and houses, on the other hand [Turner 16]. Relying on such schemata, I don’t regularly try to pour wine into a cutting board or to measure, in miles per hour, the speed of an asparagus stalk as it sits on the kitchen counter.There is also—to invoke a slightly different cognitive-scientific vocabulary—our ability to make predictions about emergent situations and sequences of events on the basis of prior, stereotypical situations and sequences stored in the memory as knowledge representations sometimes called frames and scripts [see Schank and Abelson]. For example, the script associated with making a purchase guides me in my interaction with the person at a cash register, such that I can make seemingly effortless predictions about what this person wants me to do... (shrink)

Of the theologians and philosophers now writing on biblical narrative, Hans Frei and Paul Ricoeur are probably the most prominent. It is significant that their views converge on important issues. Both are uncomfortable with hermeneutic theories that convert the text into an abstract philosophical system, an ideal typological structure, or a mere occasion for existential decision. Frei and Ricoeur seem knit together in a common enterprise; they appear to be building a single narrative theology. I argue that the (...) appearance of symmetry is an illusion. There is a fundamental conflict between the ‘pure narrativism’ of Frei and the ‘impure narrativism’ of Ricoeur. I give reasons for thinking that Ricoeur’s is the stronger position. (shrink)

Contemporary ICTs such as speaking machines and computer games tend to create illusions. Is this ethically problematic? Is it deception? And what kind of “reality” do we presuppose when we talk about illusion in this context? Inspired by work on similarities between ICT design and the art of magic and illusion, responding to literature on deception in robot ethics and related fields, and briefly considering the issue in the context of the history of machines, this paper discusses these (...) questions through the lens of stage magic and illusionism, with the aim of reframing the very question of deception. It investigates if we can take a more positive or at least morally neutral view of magic, illusion, and performance, while still being able to understand and criticize the relevant phenomena, and if we can describe and evaluate these phenomena without recourse to the term “deception” at all. This leads the paper into a discussion about metaphysics and into taking a relational and narrative turn. Replying to Tognazzini, the paper identifies and analyses two metaphysical positions: a narrative and performative non-dualist position is articulated in response to what is taken to be a dualist, in particular Platonic, approach to “deception” phenomena. The latter is critically discussed and replaced by a performative and relational approach which avoids a distant “view from nowhere” metaphysics and brings us back to the phenomena and experience in the performance relation. The paper also reflects on the ethical and political implications of the two positions: for the responsibility of ICT designers and users, which are seen as co-responsible magicians or co-performers, and for the responsibility of those who influence the social structures that shape who has power to deceive or to let others perform. (shrink)

How one transcends the self depends on the self that experiences it. Is it instigated or sought, does it happen by accident, or by an act of Grace? Is it common or rare? Is it brought on by the ingestion of psychedelic agents or by meditation or by being overcome by fear or merely by caring more about the welfare of others than oneself? Is it transcendence to experience a shift of perspective or dissolution of the self? In the pages (...) that follow, each of these paths is explored in nine ways, each unique unto itself. None of them deal with absolute self-transcendence, which should be no surprise, for, as I’ve indicated, there would no longer a self or person to record or communicate the event. Many of them deal the transcendence of self-consciousness, my own included, but only two describe the ingestion of mind-altering psychedelics to catalyze the event. One sees self-construction from the ground-up, as it were, as a form of transcending a previous self that has disintegrated. One looks to acts of kindness to sidestep the illusion of self-consciousness. Two, at least, look to creative experience in the arts as a way to connect with universal spontaneity, but in very different ways. The others refer to what might be called spiritual experiences that, though thirsted for or sought, arrive unexpectedly, almost like a gift. (shrink)

Introduction -- Boundaries and battlegrounds : negotiating formal ethical approval for research with children and young people -- Ethical spaces and places -- The rights of participation and the realities of inclusion -- The illusion of autonomy : from agency to interdependency -- Ramifications of category entitlement : in what ways does who we are determine what we say? -- Privileging voices -- Conclusion.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 371-373 [Access article in PDF] Book Review French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years: Memory, Narrative, Desire French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years: Memory, Narrative, Desire, by Colin Davis & Elizabeth Fallaize; 160pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, $24.95. Like the Mitterrand era itself, Davis and Fallaize's French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years is somewhat uneven. The election of François Mitterrand in 1981 (...) as the President of the Fifth Republic was a milestone in modern French history. After the conservative politics of the 1960s and 70s, the election of a socialist president and legislature seemed to offer the possibility of a new political and intellectual atmosphere. Indeed, the first two years of Mitterrand's presidency brought sweeping reforms. However, several scandals, continued economic problems and later "cohabitation" with a right-wing legislative majority muted the original verve. Mired in partisan politics, the government often appeared ineffectual.As with the political arena, French fiction of the 1980s was produced under the shadow of another long-standing French institution--the nouveau roman. Again we find a new direction, a turning-away from the past during the 1980s. Yet there was no outright refusal. There were no manifestos or polemical articles written by budding novelists, no claim to Literature. As Annie Ernaux describes her work Une Femme (1987): "Mon projet est de nature littéraire [...]. Mais je souhaite rester, d'une certaine façon, au-dessous de la littérature" (My project is of a literary nature [...]. But I wish to remain, in a certain way, beneath literature (p. 144).This lack of pretension is important, for it helps us better understand the writing of the period. As Davis and Fallaize point out, in the fiction of the Mitterrand years we find a return to history, to the subject, and to storytelling, three areas disdained by the new novelists of the 1950s and 60s (pp. 12-15). But at the same time, there is not an elegiac return to the conventions of the past. There are no didactic tales of Lucien de Rubempré's lost illusions. A good example of this is Patrick Roegiers's Beau Regard (1990), the account of a dinner during which hardly anyone speaks, told by a narrator who knows no one else at the table. Davis and Fallaize note: "In these novels the event is merely an incident, the story no more than an anecdote, and the anecdote merely a fait divers" (p. 147). Although not inconsequential, argue Davis and Fallaize, there is an unquestionable modesty to these texts.In the introduction to their work Davis and Fallaize write: "The aim of the current book is to analyze some of the most important and interesting directions in French fiction through detailed discussions of a selection of texts, all published during François Mitterrand's period as President of the Fifth Republic (1981-95)" (p. 1). This is exactly what they accomplish, selecting six novels--Duras's L'Amant (The Lover, 1984), Pennac's Au bonheur des ogres (The Scapegoat, 1985), Semprun's La Montagne blanche (1986), Echenoz's Lac (Lake, 1989), Guilbert's A l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauvé la vie (To the Friend Who Did Not Save [End Page 371] my Life, 1990), and Ernaux's Passion simple (Simple Passion, 1991)--and spending one chapter on each. They also discuss some of the important features of the era's fiction including memory, especially of World War II, contemporary culture and postmodernism, and autofiction.However, the book's limited goal also leads to some of its problems. As a whole, the work lacks cohesion. Chapters often read like individual essays. Moreover, although some chapters are well-grounded critically and contextually, others are not. Finally, the conclusion is too brief to synthesize aptly the various topics discussed in the previous chapters. The reader does not have a solid grasp of the fictional landscape of the Mitterrand years, but rather, as the introduction indicated, knowledge of "some of the [...] interesting directions in French fiction."One of the most illuminating chapters considers Daniel... (shrink)

Why Deleuze and Ricoeur? -- Fields for potential and possible connectors -- Investigative strategies -- Towards the cohesion of a life : chapter outline -- Problematizing the field of the self -- Between rigidification and dehiscence : context and counter-context -- Ancestry for the self in a problematic field -- Conceptual personae and the self -- Aporia of the inscrutability of the self -- Sweeney : philosophical bathyscope -- Critique on the kantian self -- Pretensions of the kantian self -- (...) Divided self still surrounded by the mad and the replicant -- The narrative self -- Oneself as another or onselves as myself -- The narrative self : origins in Kant -- Appearance and exposition of the narrative self -- Working through narrative -- Towards an interrogation of the narrative self -- Questioning the narrative self through its progenitors -- Methodology : questioning back -- The narrative self in retrospect -- The poetic composition of the self : threefold mimesis -- Summary : problems for narrative identity -- Transversals between Ricoeur and Deleuze -- In the land of the larval selves -- Origins in Schelling -- Ontology of productivity -- The dogmatic image of thought -- The narrative self as twin multiplicities -- Dissolving the narrative self -- From multiplicity to the narrative self -- Obscure stammering for a new narrative self -- Between time and the self : a fractured I -- Laws in the germplasm of narrative : the dark precursor -- Narrative persona -- From debt to excess -- Ricoeur's dilemma of the self : substance or illusion? -- Deleuze and Aristotle : a disavowed affinity -- Interzone -- Between dark precursor and narrative self : gelassenheit -- Inhering problems for the becoming-narrative self -- An unguessed axis for narrative selves -- From excess to debt : evolving constraints to narrative identity -- Where to start, three stations : natality, personhood, narrative selfhood -- First constraint : proustian love and lack -- Narrative constraints : implications for the synthesis of the heterogeneous -- The poetic imagination within the evolving constraints of narrative productivity -- Where Deleuze was, there Ricoeur shall be? -- The narrative self : a badly posed question -- Second constraint : imagination within structure and obligation -- A self entombed in a debt to the past. (shrink)

Forschungsgeschichte - Handbuch/übergreifende Darstellung.

Dumézil’s trifunctional theory applied to the only grail plot in Chrétien de Troyes’ Conte du Graal proves to be neither faithful nor worthy of credit. Philological, historical, cultural, cognitive and narratological arguments raise critical objections and question its artificial character. In fact, the incidental episode of the grail functions as a narrative drawer in a plot belonging to the global tale ATU 910B (Good precepts) relating to the part of the work regarding Perceval.

Resumen: Este artículo se propone ahondar en la función política del relato distópico, entendido como un tipo de imagen política. Siguiendo la intuición de Gordin, Tilley y Prakash (2010) de que las distopías son utopías que han errado su curso, se plantea que el relato distópico busca construir una imagen política indeseable que permita romper la captura del deseo que ha producido la persecución de una determinada ilusión-utopía. Se propone, como criterio de lectura de las narrativas distópicas, que su emergencia (...) y proliferación se produce a partir de las experiencias históricas que dan cuenta del fracaso del ímpetu emancipador de la modernidad y su deriva en sistemas sociales y políticos que perfeccionan la dominación. En particular, en los términos de Wallerstein (1995), el proceso con el que la modernidad de la tecnología se impone históricamente a la modernidad de la liberación. Abstract: This article aims to delve into the political function of the dystopian narrative, understood as a type of political image. Following of Gordin, Tilley & Prakash´s (2010) intuition, that dystopias are utopias that have gone wrong, it suggests that the dystopian narrative seeks to build an undesirable political image that permits the breaking away from the capture of desire produced by the pursuit of a certain utopia-illusion. We propose, as a key to the reading of dystopian narratives, that their emergence and proliferation stems from the historical experiences that account for the failure of the emancipatory impetus of modernity and its drift into social and political systems that perfect domination. Specifically, in the terms of Wallerstein (1995), the process by which the modernity of technology is historically imposed on the modernity of liberation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.2 (2002) 261-282 [Access article in PDF] The "Progress of Ambition": Character, Narrative, and Philosophy in the Works of William Robertson Neil Hargraves In his biography of William Robertson, Dugald Stewart claimed that by "few writers of the present age has [the] combination of philosophy with history been more often attempted than by Dr. Robertson; and by none have the inconveniences which (...) it threatens been more successfully avoided." 1 At first sight Stewart's assertion seems puzzling. Arnaldo Momigliano considered Robertson to be less successful than Edward Gibbon in his integration of the three elements of eighteenth-century historical writing, philosophy, narrative, and erudition. 2 Despite Robertson's stated belief that "arrangement" was the principal task of the historian, his organizational framework appeared to foster separation rather than integration. 3 Thus, his central work, The History of the Reign of Charles V (1769), is divided into three discrete parts. An apparently conventional narrative of high politics and diplomacy is prefaced by an essay on medieval Europe, A View of the Progress of Society in Europe, which was regarded by his contemporaries as a classic of "philosophical" history, 4 while [End Page 261] Robertson appended to both copious "Proofs and Illustrations." The structure of The History of America (1777) is even less integrated, despite criticalpraise of its "regular plan... complete narration and perfect whole." 5 To other critics his interpolation of dissertations upon the "condition and character" of the Americans, Mexicans, and Peruvians, seemed to sever the thread of the narrative and consequently to break up the unity of the work. 6 Yet as this paper will seek to demonstrate, there was a vital connection between the narrative and "philosophical" components of Robertson's major histories: the theoretical dissertations served recognizably narrative purposes. The bridge between them lies in the complex notion of character created by the expansion of historical forms in the eighteenth century."Philosophical" history defined itself in opposition to the vacuities and muddles of conventional political-diplomatic historical narrative. Its advantages over narrative were various: the revelation of general rather than particular causes, grounding the history on more certain and less random principles: 7 the penetration of causes "insensible" and invisible to the eyes of a careless observer, obscured by the "great theatre of the world"; 8 a broadening of the subject-matter, away from the mere rehearsal of the struggles between crown and nobility or fixation with constitution and government, towards a more inclusive and heterogeneous history of "manners, including arts, sciences, society" and what today would be termed "mentalities," and, related to the last point, a principle of organization that would reduce the apparent chaos and multiplicity of the past to a simple and luminous plan of arrangement. 9 This was the most exacting requirement for the philosophical historian. As a critic wrote of Robertson's View, its value lay most in its "vast and magnificent plan... that profound and easy art of classing [facts], in such a manner that... the accumulated multiplicity of events is gradually reduced to a small number." It [End Page 262] required a more "elevated view... above all discussions and disputes." 10 Philosophic history aimed to strip away the illusion of appearances and substitute an unseen but more regular and systematic history. In its more ambitious formulations it aimed not simply at a universal history of mankind but at no less than a "history of the human mind": an attempt to explain through historical description the enormous gulf that separated modern man from his savage ancestor. As Robertson himself famously declared in Book IV of America, In order to complete the history of the human mind, and attain to a perfect knowledge of its nature and operations, we must contemplate man in all those various situations wherein he has been placed. We must follow him in his progress through the different stages of society, as he gradually advances from the infant state of civil life towards its maturity and decline. (VIII, 49-50) This was a history of progress... (shrink)

Say to the Sun, “Don’t Rise,” and to the Moon, “Don’t Set”: Two Oral Narratives from the Country- side of Maharashtra. Edited and translated by Anne Feldhaus, with Ramdas Atkar and Rajaram Zagade. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xii + 632, 3 illus. $99.

L’article examine la question des racines pulsionnelles du narratif en analysant le statut et la fonction du concept métapyschologique de pulsion dans les thèses sémiotiques de Jean Petitot. Cette question est d’ordre épistémologique et concerne la présence de thèses lacaniennes dans une théorie sémiotique qui affirme la morphogenèse du sens à partir d’un substrat naturel. L’article explique comment les critiques que Petitot adresse au structuralisme lacanien en 1981 s’insèrent dans une réinterprétation bioanthropologique et naturaliste de la métapsychologie freudienne et comment (...) cette réinterprétation précède et prépare la refondation morphodynamique de la sémiotique greimassienne. Après avoir discuté les arguments que Petitot présente pour faire de Lacan un précurseur du ‘tournant morphodynamique,’ l’article se centre sur la redéfinition de pulsion comme prégnance sémique. Il expose les avantages théoriques de cette notion, mais aborde également l’antinomie qu’elle contient. La conclusion en est que la redéfinition de la pulsion comme prégnance sémique escamote la nature sexuelle de la libido et projette sur la sémiotique morphodynamique l’ombre de ‘l’illusion archaïque.’. (shrink)