Narrative Hermeneutics

Abstract

The chapter delineates narrative hermeneutics as a framework for exploring the ethical complexities of the relationship between life and narrative and discusses the interconnections between the ethical and ontological assumptions underlying different conceptions of narrative. It outlines a broad Nietzschean-hermeneutic conception of interpretation and proposes three interconnected advantages of privileging this approach in theorizing narrative, experience, subjectivity, and their interrelations. It allows one to (1) understand how narrative relates to experience without seeing their relationship as dichotomous or identifying them with each other, that is, how they exist in a tensional but reciprocal relationship, best understood in terms of an interpretative continuum; (2) articulate how life does not form one coherent narrative but is instead a process of constant narrative reinterpretation; and (3) understand the relationship between narrative webs and the individual subjects entangled in them as fundamentally dialogical and as entwined with practices of power.

Teachers’ agency during the Covid-19 lockdown: A new materialist perspective

“…Of course, teachers' verbalisations are not 'direct' reflections of the teaching assemblages, but are told situatedly in the interviews. However, this telling activity remains essential because those accounts imply a certain understanding of what is possible for the teller in a particular context (Meretoja 2017).…”

Methodological Insights on Teachers’ Professional Agency in Narratives

“…This means that certain kinds of narratives are not inherently personal and that people will use a variety of grammatical resources. In narrative practice, the process of telling or writing one's account to someone else or for oneself (Meretoja, 2017) is the target of the research.…”

“…This article argues that focusing on narrative as practice can provide a means to explore the incomplete and intertwined essence of teachers' professional agency. This is because the narratives told by teachers are not located solely within them, but are constituted through reciprocal relationships embedded within the web of cultural narratives (Meretoja, 2017). In this article, I draw on both narrative theorisations and empirical studies to elaborate on the argument.…”

Governing the future: perspectives from literary studies – commentary to Jones

“…Westphal (2007, 59, 63), in Geocriticism, considers literature as "experimental field of alternative realities," and a "laboratory of the possible". More generally, literature does not only describe possibilities, it is arguably also about extending an awareness of the possible into the world of the reader, providing readers with an expanded sense of possibility (Meretoja 2017). Literary studies has in turn long developed methods and frameworks to speak of possible worlds, also in relation to future possibilities (see Ameel & Neuvonen 2016).…”