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  • The Travelling Concepts of Narrative ed. by Matti Hyvärinen, Mari Hatavara, and Lars-Christer Hydén
  • Thomas Van Parys
Matti Hyvärinen, Mari Hatavara, and Lars-Christer Hydén, eds. The Travelling Concepts of Narrative. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2013. 311 pp.

A collection of essays entitled The Travelling Concepts of Narrative — note the appropriate lack of a specifying subtitle — is potentially quite wide-ranging and far-reaching. While the various narratives contained in the book indeed largely attain that potential, they do so within the book’s own span. As the editors Matti Hyvärinen, Mari Hatavara, and Lars-Christer Hydén explain, this volume concerns itself with “three important divisions in narrative theory: the conceptual, the material and the contextual” — the main goal being “conceptual clarity” to advance interdisciplinary studies (5). The book is divided into three sections, the first dealing with the narrative turn(s); the second with the fluid borders between fictional and non-fictional and between “natural” and “unnatural” narratives; the third with the cross-pollination between narrative studies and psychology.

Hyvärinen’s “Travelling Metaphors, Transforming Concepts,” which opens the volume, can be read as its manifesto. Pleading for “a readiness for a reflective re-assessment of the tradition of narrative research itself” (16), Hyvärinen shows (at times quite polemically) how narrative “has not travelled around in the form of an intact, unchanging concept” (25). Focusing on the metaphorical connections between narrative and life, the main stake of his essay is “a series of conceptual clarifications and distinctions in order to help grasp the obvious tension between narrow and broad meanings of narrative” (28). Through the work of Paul Ricoeur, Mark Freeman subsequently explains “Why Narrative Is Here to Stay”: “the real, the humanly real, is itself inextricably bound to narrative” (59), he argues, as the “backward movement of narrativity” (“located in the work of hindsight”; 44) is key to our reconstruction of meaning and hence to the human experience. In “To the Narrative Turn and Back: The Political Impact [End Page 364] of Storytelling in Feminism,” Olivia Guaraldo goes back to Hannah Arendt to give an account of the historical importance of narrative practices for second-wave feminism in Italy. Paul John Eakin’s article, “Travelling with Narrative: From Text to Body,” becomes a narrative in its own right — a narrative of the evolution of the author’s research on autobiography, which makes the case for a unified field theory of narrative based on his reading of the work of neurologist Antonio Damasio. Closing off the first section with “Philosophical Underpinnings of the Narrative Turn in Theory and Fiction,” Hanna Meretoja widens the impact of the narrative turn from theoretical discourse to the cultural sphere, with twentieth-century French literature as a concrete case. She argues convincingly that the narrative turn is crucially also a turn “towards acknowledging not only the cognitive but also the existential relevance of narrative for our being in the world” (94).

In “Fact and Fiction: Exploring the Narrative Mind,” Jens Brockmeier aptly dismantles the opposition between fact and fiction through a hermeneutic analysis of narrative “as a psychologically fundamental practice of meaning construction,” shaped “by a shared cultural canon of narrative conventions” (125). Conversely, Stefan Iversen, in his chapter “Broken or Unnatural? On the Distinction of Fiction in Non-Conventional First Person Narration,” convincingly questions “the validity and applicability of a unified theory of narrative based on similarities on a sense-making level” (142) by placing “fictionalized narrative in contrast to non-fictionalized narrative” (153). As he argues, “[t]he consciousnesses of the latter are imbued with an ethical obligation to pay attention to the narrating human as a human being, and therefore ask us to seek out and aid in the reconstruction of coherence and meaning even amongst the seemingly incoherent and dispersive” (153). Mari Hatavara, then, by “Making Sense in Autobiography,” encourages textual analysis in order “to investigate the text as a site for sense-making” (164), highlighting “the challenges and pleasures the literary organisation of the text provides for the reader” (166). In “‘Unnatural’ Narratives? The Case of Second-Person Narration,” Jarmila Mildorf in turn counters the assumption of “unnatural” narratology that...

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