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127 Andreea Deciu Ritivoi A time to Be Born, A time to die Saint Augustine’s Confessions and Paul Ricoeur’s Time and narrative 8 Paul Ricoeur’s most sustained engagement with St. Augustine’s Confessions appears in the opening chapters of his magisterial three-volume study of narrative, Time and Narrative. Published in the mid-1980s, this work consecrated Ricoeur as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. Recognition came first in the United States (where he had already immigrated), but the book was also well received in France. it consists of an original, eclectic mélange of theories and approaches that brings together classical and medieval philosophy with German metaphysics, and French historiography with Anglo-Saxon logic. The key idea proposed in Time and Narrative is that mimetic representation is not limited to the depiction of reality in stories but also includes two additional levels: the level of prefiguration , where our perception of reality fosters particular storytelling techniques , and the reception of narratives, which comes to create a universe in itself that in turn shapes our understanding of reality as well as of other stories.1 This conception is known as the threefold mimesis, and it represents one of Ricoeur’s most innovative contributions to narrative theory. Time plays a critical role in this theory, and Augustine is the main source of inspiration for Ricoeur’s reflections on time. The very title Time and Narrative makes recourse to Augustine seem justified , perhaps even predictable, given the enduring fame of the Augustinian reflections on time. However, Ricoeur’s own conception of time was influenced more decisively by another philosopher, Martin Heidegger. Was Ricoeur, then, using Augustine somewhat as a foil? The affirmative answer i offer to this question is not intended to diminish the significance of Augustine’s theory of time for Ricoeur’s philosophy. Rather, i want to 128 f Augustine for the PhilosoPhers trace the way in which a close engagement with Augustinian thought—read by Ricoeur in minute detail—takes us beyond Augustine and leads to a perspective on time that not only offers the key to an understanding of one of the most important concepts thematized in Ricoeur’s philosophical work, mimesis, but also is ultimately important for the conception of language that it shapes. i begin this essay by situating the theory of time inspired by Augustine and developed by Ricoeur in Time and Narrative in the larger context of the latter’s attempts to incorporate time into narrative theory. i offer a reconstruction of Ricoeur’s analysis of Augustine as it appears in chapter 1 of volume 1 of Time and Narrative and is later revisited in chapter 1 of the third volume. next, i look at the way in which Ricoeur reads Augustine against Aristotle’s Poetics and how this hermeneutic strategy led him to important insights that became the foundation of his model of mimesis, a model that moves beyond the idea of the verisimilitude of a narrative text and the realm of reference and into incorporating the broad repertoire of actions and actors that are intelligible to a particular audience at a given time, as well as the ways in which stories can challenge and enrich this repertoire. Finally, i conclude that a theory of narrative that incorporates a phenomenology of time, as Ricoeur’s does, instead of reducing it to logical sequences of events, allows us to understand the cognitive and moral dimensions of narrative far beyond what other models allow. time And lAnguAge Time and Narrative is, arguably, Ricoeur’s most complex and important work, in its implications for communication and language theory. While volume 1 sets the theoretical foundation by drawing on the issue of historical representation through narratives, volume 2 explores semiotic theories of narrative , from Vladimir Propp to A. J. Greimas and Claude Bremond, and then applies them to analyses of canonical texts in modernist literature, such as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, and Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Finally, volume 3 discusses the connections between linguistic representation and lived experience, proposing a theory of mimesis that stresses the transformative power of language. Despite the focus on literature and historiography, Time and Narrative is not the work of a literary theorist or a philosopher of history. Rather, Ricoeur’s interest in literary works (especially modernist) and historical accounts— both narrative enterprises—should be seen as an effort to foreground time [3.136.97.64] Project...

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