The Use and Abuse of Stories

Name: The Use and Abuse of Stories | New Directions in Narrative Hermeneutics
Brand: Oxford University Press Inc
Price: 116.5 EUR
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New Directions in Narrative Hermeneutics

Mark P. Freeman Hanna Meretoja(Editor)

Oxford University Press Inc

Published on 27. June 2023

Book

Hardback

392 pages

978-0-19-757102-6 (ISBN)

€116.50incl. 7% vat

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Description

Narrative practice has come under attack in the current "post-truth" era. In fact, many associate "narrative hermeneutics"--the field of inquiry concerned with reflection on the meaning and interpretation of stories--directly with this putative movement beyond truth.

Challenging this view, The Use and Abuse of Stories argues that this broad arena of inquiry instead serves as a vitally important vehicle for addressing and redressing the social and political problems at hand. Hanna Meretoja and Mark Freeman have gathered an interdisciplinary group of esteemed authors to explore how interpretation is relevant to current discussions in narrative studies and to the broader debate that revolves around issues of truth, facts, and narrative. The contributions turn to the tradition of narrative hermeneutics to emphasize that narrative is a cultural meaning-making practice that is integral to how we make sense of who we are and who we could be.

Addressing topics ranging from the dangers of political narratives to questions of truth in medical and psychiatric practice, this volume shows how narrative hermeneutics contributes to topical debates both in interdisciplinary narrative studies and in the current cultural and political situation in which issues of truth have gained new urgency.

Reviews / Votes

This innovative collection brings together experts from a range of fields including literature, psychology, philosophy, education, and medicine to explore the dangers of narrative and the recuperative possibilities of a narrative hermeneutics. Timely, and wide-ranging in scope, this book will be of great value to scholars and practitioners who want to understand why stories are so pervasive in a 'post-truth' era and how they may yet spark our political imagination. * Sujatha Fernandes, author of Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling (Oxford, 2017) * This is a necessary book for these times. Amid darkness, suspicion, and cold estrangement come searchers to shed light on our shipwreck. These essays clear an intellectually rigorous path from post-truth to reciprocal solicitude for the Other. Authentic dialogue and relation are again within reach. * Rita Charon, author of Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness * We human beings are hopelessly hermeneutical beings. We can't help but make up stories-be they 'true' or 'false' or somewhere in between-to make sense of our lives, ourselves, our worlds. This volume, an impressive collection of solid and wide-ranging scholarship, constitutes a searching, sorely-needed meditation on the role of the narrative turn itself in both contributing to-and countering-the emergence of our so-called 'post-truth' age. It's a book which narrativists in every field, not to mention politicians of every stripe, should take seriously indeed. * William L. Randall, author of The Narrative Complexity of Ordinary Life: Tales from the Coffee Shop * How can we humans live amid increasingly violent conflicting interpretations of our world and each other? These essays allow readers to judge how far narrative hermeneutics can help with this troubling problem. * Arthur Frank, author of Letting Stories Breathe and King Lear: Shakespeare's Dark Consolations *

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Persons

Hanna Meretoja is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory at the University of Turku (Finland) and Principal Investigator in the Academy of Finland research consortium "Instrumental Narratives: The Limits of Storytelling and New Story-Critical Narrative Theory" (2018-2023). Her monographs include The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible (Oxford, 2018) and The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory (2014), and she has co-edited The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma (2020, with Colin Davis) and Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative (2018), Memory Studies special issue "Cultural Memorial Forms" (2021, with Eneken Laanes), and Poetics Today special issue "Critical Approaches to the Storytelling Boom" (2022, with Maria Maekelae).

Mark Freeman is Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Society in the

Department of Psychology at the College of the Holy Cross. He is the author of numerous works, including Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative (1993); Hindsight: The Promise and Peril of Looking Backward (Oxford, 2010); The Priority of the Other: Thinking and Living Beyond the Self (Oxford, 2014); and, most recently, Do I Look at You with Love? Reimagining the Story of Dementia (2021). Winner of the Theodore R. Sarbin Award from the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology and the Joseph B. Gittler Award from the American Psychological Foundation, Freeman is a Fellow in the American Psychological Association and serves as Editor for the Oxford University Press series "Explorations in Narrative Psychology."

Editor

Mark P. Freeman

Distinguished Professor of Ethics and SocietyDistinguished Professor of Ethics and Society, Department of Psychology, College of the Holy Cross

Hanna Meretoja

Professor, Literary Studies and Creative WritingProfessor, Literary Studies and Creative Writing, University of Turku

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