Editor’s Introduction

This issue of Storyworlds offers four provocative essays and a book review, written by scholars who represent different disciplines (psychology, philosophy, American studies, rhetoric, and literature and media), in keeping with the journal’s commitment to the study of narrative from a variety of angles. Also in keeping with the mission of the journal, as presented in the previous issue’s introduction, together these articles illustrate both a macro- and a micro-level perspective on narrative to further our understanding of narrative as simultaneously an experiential activity, a social, political, and historical practice, and a craft. The bookreview section appears for the first time in Storyworlds. This addition is meant to recognize the robustness and maturity of narrative studies as an area of research and scholarship and to keep readers abreast the latest-cutting edge works published in the field. Occasionally, Storyworlds will feature more than one book review, but by showcasing mainly one study at a time we hope to offer careful, in-depth readings of the important contributions made to narrative studies. The book discussed in this issue, Paul Cohen’s History and Popular Memory: The Power of Story in Moments of Crisis (Columbia University Press, 2014), deals with the topic of history understood as significant events that receive exhaustive narrative treatment and become the cornerstone of a broad public, indeed national, understanding of the past. Cohen’s study, reviewed by Jessica Harrell, is about the role played by historical narratives in a society’s self-understanding—and this is one of the two key themes of the current issue. We find this theme in the essays by Jens Brockmeier and Hanna Meretoja and by Fernando Nascimento, both concerned with the role played by storytelling in informing how we make sense of our own experiences, whether it is in fiction, medicine, or decision making. The other theme of the current issue is narrative and reading, taken up by Marco Caracciolo and by Arnaud Schmitt.

Approaching narrative as a hermeneutic activity, Brockmeier and Meretoja examine the relevance of storytelling for self-understanding, revisiting some key ideas from the works of Paul Ricoeur, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Martin Heidegger but also introducing a nuanced and novel conceptual position. The authors discuss literary fiction as well as narrative medicine, and the theoretical debates that draw on them, as illustrative domains of existential and hermeneutic reflection on narrative. For them, meaning-making is the hallmark of living a life in the cultural world. Reminding us that human understanding is mediated and that storytelling involves a process of revisions and reinterpretations, Brockmeier and Meretoja turn to narrative hermeneutics because it allows them to conceive of literature and the other arts as forms of cultural self-understanding that have existential relevance. Narrative hermeneutics, as they employ it here, examines what makes artistic forms of narrative ideally suited to expand and, indeed, transcend an existing horizon of understanding. They argue for a notion of the hermeneutics of narrative that is not limited to storytelling in linguistic, discursive, and literary contexts, but conceives of narrative practices as forms of life in a broader sense. Using examples that range from everyday storytelling to literary texts and the life worlds of health and illness, the authors show how narrative practices engender, in various social and semiotic environments, existential acts of meaning (to use the terms of Jerome Bruner).

Acts of meaning are at the core of deliberation processes, because deliberation requires the ability to structure experience in a way that allows us to understand who we are, what we desire, and what our lives are like. These are all, at core, narrative acts that invite reflection on how exactly they shape deliberation. Fernando Nascimento, who comes to narrative as a philosopher and a student of Ricoeur’s work, is interested in the figure of the phronimos, as an ideal type representing the deliberator in a variety of situations, from everyday decisions in moments of interpersonal conflict to ethical decisions in medical communication or in judicial settings. His claims about the relation between narrative and deliberation are both descriptive—insofar as he presents common, almost routine practices in everyday affairs—and normative—insofar as he uses existing practices to reflect upon the ideals they suggest and seem to aspire to. The deliberator, for whom Nascimento uses the Aristotelian figure of the phronimos (fully accepting its cultural baggage, especially the intriguing though possibly also disturbing air of omnipotence), is able to refigure himself to reflect the ethos of the community, in order to deliberate in accordance with the community ethos. A note on the use of the masculine pronoun for the phronimos: Storyworlds does not allow sexist language in the articles it publishes, but in this case the masculine form is intended to capture the historical origin of the concept in classical Aristotelian philosophy, which it preserves, loyal to the primary text, as an abstraction rather than a stand-in for a real masculine persona identifiable as the ideal deliberator.

Understanding ourselves, our aspirations, and our acts represents not just a dimension of storytelling but is ultimately the product of the activity of reading. Marco Caracciolo’s article presents an interesting hypothesis about how we read stories: the author suggests that our responses are embodied even beyond the already-known, story-oriented phenomena such as kinesthetic empathy for characters and feelings of immersion in the world of the plot—the two areas on which narrative theorists have tended to concentrate so far. Using Edgar A. Poe’s writing as example, the author shows that by implicating the heart’s interoceptive rhythm and its affective significance, a story can maximize the rhythmic nature of the reader’s encounters with narrative, thus bringing to light (and to consciousness) the “prelinguistic substrates” of the narration (an aspect that has been explored by other scholars). Embodiment, for him, is both cognitive and prelinguistic, playing out especially at the level of temporality in the unfolding of the story. Caracciolo approaches this topic from a phenomenological perspective: in his view, we become aware of our responding to discourse-level time and plot through our bodies, not only affectively but proprioceptively and kinesthetically, imagining movement and rhythm like listeners of instrumental music. Caracciolo uses as indication of the embodied reading of narratives the densely metaphorical vocabulary we often employ to talk about stories, for example, fast-paced and suspenseful (as a pattern of muscular tension and release). Work such as this awaits empirical confirmation, which Caracciolo readily acknowledges, but it represents a rich conceptual foundation upon which further studies can fruitfully elaborate (and find a host in Storyworlds, if interested).

Arnaud Schmitt is also interested in reading, but as a hermeneutic activity, in line with Brockmeier and Meretoja. Building on Marie-Laure Ryan’s work, Schmitt starts with the assumption that reading is a modular activity that can follow different diegetic lines as it tries to make sense of the characters’ experiences in the emplotted universes these inhabit. Reading, then, unfolds to a large extent as a competition for hermeneutic dominance among different story lines, as the reader works hermeneutically to establish which story line is dominant, which is subsumed or parallel to others, and which lines are marginal or central. This interpretive work captures, for Schmitt, the constant transitionality of the hermeneutic process. Finally, Jessica Harrell reveals the complexity of our reading of history in accounts that become coterminous with a public memory of events, making us take for granted a particular version of the past over other possible accounts.

This issue of Storyworlds shows, across all of the essays, the rich work that narrative can do in shaping the worlds we inhabit at several different levels, from responses that involve our bodies to those that involve large discursive and institutional forces. Storyworlds remains interested in this type of scholarship, especially as its future issues will attempt to shed light on the connections between narrative and other major questions, such as temporality, the impact of new media on reading and interpreting stories, or the debates between literature-oriented narrative scholars and a newer generation of researchers interested in video games or computer games. As before, Storyworlds remains committed to publishing conceptually and methodologically rigorous and original work, beyond particular foci or interests.