The Ethics of Storytelling

Abstract

Against the backdrop of the polarized debate on the ethical significance of storytelling, this book develops a nuanced framework for exploring the ethical complexity of the roles narratives play in human lives. Focusing on how narratives enlarge and diminish the spaces of possibilities in which people act, think, and reimagine the world, it proposes a theoretical-analytical framework for engaging with both the ethical potential and the risks of storytelling. It elaborates a narrative hermeneutics that treats narratives as culturally mediated interpretative practices that can be oppressive, empowering, or both, and argues that the relationship between narrative unconscious and narrative imagination shapes one’s sense of the possible. Its hermeneutic narrative ethics differentiates between six dimensions of narratives’ ethical potential: they can cultivate a sense of the possible; promote self-understanding; enable understanding other lives non-subsumptively in their singularity; transform narrative in-betweens; develop the capacity for perspective-taking; and function as forms of ethical inquiry. These aspects are analyzed in dialogue with literary and autobiographical narratives that deal with the legacy of the Second World War by problematizing the adequacy of the perpetrator–victim dichotomy—exploring how it is as dialogic storytellers, fundamentally vulnerable, interdependent, and implicated in violent histories, that individuals and communities become who they are. The book brings into dialogue narrative ethics, literary narrative studies, narrative psychology, narrative philosophy, and cultural memory studies. It develops narrative hermeneutics as a philosophically rigorous, historically sensitive, and analytically subtle approach to the ethical stakes of the debate on the narrative dimension of human existence.

Political theology beyond interruption: (re)discovering the ambiguity of the practice of theology

“…Hanna Meretoja's work The Ethics of Storytelling seeks to develop a 'hermeneutic narrative ethics' that works to draw out this constructed nature of narratives, showing not only how narratives are influenced by the past, but also how they are culturally mediated and can inform future decision making. 13 Here Meretoja highlights both how individual memory is influenced by its social context and how, as our interpretations of the past are told and retold, they create a specific way of understanding the world -one that not only influences immediate choices but also can orient us in a specific way in the future, especially if we are not critical of the process of narrating itself. 14 Her work seeks to draw out these layers of narratives and highlight the complex strands that come together to make up the stories we tell, arguing that by doing so we can 'expand our sense of the possible', 15 while also seeking to unearth that which has been left out of dominant narratives.…”

“…A nonsubsumptive approach 'problematizes simplistic categorization', blurring the boundaries between what we would otherwise separate, and 'fosters an ethos of openness to the unknown'. 16 Instead of ignoring counternarratives, a nonsubsumptive approach recognizes that narrating does not encapsulate the whole of reality, and, as such, welcomes counternarratives with curiosity and uses them as an opportunity for dialogue. It is in this dialogue -a continual uncovering, questioning and (re)making -that narratives are in a state of becoming, growing and changing as new information comes forward, and as they themselves are continually deconstructed and reconstructed anew.…”

Lähilukeminen ennen ja nyt

“…Tutkijoiden hypoteeseissa kirjallisuuden lukeminen mahdollistaa ensinnäkin ymmärryksen toisten kokemuksista ja eri näkökulmien eroista. Tätä on kuvattu esimerkiksi sosiaalisen tiedon, näkökulman vaihtamisen ja kerronnallisen empatian käsitteillä (Felski 2008;Meretoja 2018;Keen 2007) ja testattu myös empiirisissä tutkimuksissa (esim. Kuzmičová et al 2017).…”

“…Kuzmičová et al 2017). Toiseksi, lähilukemisen tarjoamaa itsereflektiota ja ymmärrystä omista kokemuksista ja reaktioista on puolestaan tarkasteltu esimerkiksi kokemusten tunnistamisen ja itseymmärryksen käsitteiden avulla (Felski 2008;Meretoja 2018), ja empiirisesti on tutkittu esimerkiksi muutoksia lukijoiden persoonallisuudessa ja käsityksissä itsestä (esim. Sikora ym.…”

“…Kuten olemme kuvanneet, lähilukeminen voi mahdollistaa subjektiivisten ja objektiivisten tietämisen tapojen yhdistämisen ja auttaa ymmärtämään tilanteiden ja tapahtumien monimerkityksisyyttä. Tietämisen ja siihen monesti liitettävän varmuuden vaateen sijaan tärkeää on asioiden ja ilmiöiden avoin kohtaaminen: epävarmuuden ja tietämättömyyden hyväksyminen (Sedgwick 1997;Charon 2006;Jurecic 2012, 62-63, 128) sekä erilaisten mahdollisuuksien tunnistaminen ja kyky kuvitella niitä -"mahdollisen taju" (Meretoja 2018;ks. myös Rosenblatt 1995, 184).…”