Description
Narrative is a temporal structure inherent in our way of living and acting, argues David Carr, challenging the preoccupation with forms of discourse and with the paradigm of the text that has characterized much recent philosophy. Unlike physical or objective time, the temporality of human experience and action is configured and reflexively structured, as if by a storyteller unfolding a tale. Stories are a form of being, not merely of discourse.
Drawing on the phenomenological analyses of temporality in the writings of Husserl and Heidegger, Carr first explores the narrative form embodied in the experience, action, and life of the individual. He then projects this analysis onto the social plane. Just as an individual's life is a reflexive process resembling the composition and constant revision of an autobiography, so a community constitutes itself by composing and re-composing its own story. Narrative is thus an essential feature of historical existence.
ISBN:9780253206039
