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- Richard Menary (2008). Embodied Narratives. Journal of Consciousness Studies 15 (6):63-84.Is the self narratively constructed? There are many who would answer yes to the question. Dennett (1991) is, perhaps, the most famous proponent of the view that the self is narratively constructed, but there are others, such as Velleman (2006), who have followed his lead and developed the view much further. Indeed, the importance of narrative to understanding the mind and the self is currently being lavished with attention across the cognitive sciences (Dautenhahn, 2001; Hutto, 2007; Nelson, 2003). Emerging from this work, there appear to be a variety of ways in which we can think of the narrative construction of the self and the relationship between the narrative self and the embodied agent. I wish to examine two such ways in this paper. The first I shall call the abstract narrative account, this is because its proponents take the narrative self to be an abstraction (Dennett, 1991; Velleman, 2006). Dennett, for example, refers to the self as a centre of narrative gravity, to be thought of as analogous to a mathematical conception of the centre of gravity of an object. The second I shall call the embodied narrative account and this is the view that the self is constituted both by an embodied consciousness whose experiences are available for narration and narratives themselves, which can play a variety of roles in the agent’s psychological life.Reading list | Discuss | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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Adopting a materialist approach to the mind has far reaching implications for many presuppositions regarding the properties of the brain, including those that have traditionally been consigned to “the mental” aspect of human being. One such presupposition is the conception of the disembodied self. In this article we aim to account for the self as a material entity, in that it is wholly the result of the physiological functioning of the embodied brain. Furthermore, we attempt to account for the structure of the self by invoking the logic of the narrative. While our conception of narrative selfhood incorporates the work of both Freud and Dennett, we offer a critique of these two theorists and then proceed to amend their theories by means of complexity theory. We argue that the self can be characterised as a complex system, which allows us to account for the structure of the wholly material self.
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| | Other links: ajol.info hdl.handle.net | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The claim that selves are narratively constituted has attained considerable currency in both analytic and continental philosophy. However, a set of increasingly standard objections to narrative identity are also emerging. In this paper, I focus on metaphysically realist versions of narrative identity theory, showing how they both build on and differ from their neo-Lockean counterparts. But I also argue that narrative realism is implicitly committed to a four-dimensionalist, temporal-parts ontology of persons. That exposes narrative realism to the charge that the narratively constituted self, on the one hand, and the self that is the object of much of our everyday self-reference and self-experience, on the other, can't be the same thing. This conclusion may well force narrativists to abandon metaphysical realism about narrative selves—which, in turn, may leave the invocation of ‘narrativity’ as identity-constituting somewhat under-motivated.
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| | Other links: dx.doi.org doi.wiley.com | Scholar | At my library | More options ... This paper critically evaluates the work of Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre by comparing their understanding of the narrative structure of selfhood with paradigms derived from three other sources: Heidegger’s conception of human being as Dasein; Rowan Williams’ interpretation of Dostoevsky’s theology of narrative; and Kierkegaard’s project of reading the Old Testament narrative of Abraham and Isaac as part of the Christian God’s autobiography. These comparisons suggest that Taylor and MacIntyre’s own narratives of Western culture lack a certain, theologically required openness to a variety of specific ways in which both individuality and history resist understanding in narrative terms as much as they demand it.
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| | Other links: dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... A theory of musical narrative. An introduction to narrative analysis : Chopin's prelude in G major, op. 28, no. 3 ; Perspectives and critiques ; A theory of musical narrative : conceptual considerations ; A theory of musical narrative : analytical considerations ; Narrative and topic -- Archetypal narratives and phases. Romance narratives and Micznik's degrees of narrativity ; Tragic narratives : an extended analysis of Schubert, piano sonata in B flat major, D. 960, first movement ; Ironic narratives : subtypes and phases ; Comic narratives and discursive strategies ; Summary and conclusion.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Why the narrative self? -- Contemporary interest in narrative theory -- Is the self real or illusory? -- Dennett's brand of naturalism -- The heterophenomenological method (HM) -- Consciousness and the self -- The naturalist narrative self -- Puzzle cases -- The HM and the narrative self -- The limitations of Dennett's account -- The limits of language -- Epistemological fragility -- Ontological fragility -- Naturalism and phenomenology -- Confronting naturalism -- Phenomenology and hermeneutics -- The detour of interpretation -- Reflexivity -- The problem of personal identity -- The number of selves, identity relations and truth -- The capable self and its narrative identity -- Narrative identity and aristotelian muthos -- Narrative recounting of human lives -- LPSE-identity and literary puzzle cases -- Certainty, knowledge and attestation -- Narrative attestation -- Fact and fiction -- Narrative attestation -- The limitations of Ricoeur's account -- Selective appeals to literary and psychoanalytic discourses -- Focus on the self-examining self -- The ontological status of the narrative self -- The epistemological status of the narrative self -- The practical self -- Why the narrative self?
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... In this article, “Narrative Closure,” a theory of the nature of narrative closure is developed. Narrative closure is identified as the phenomenological feeling of finality that is generated when all the questions saliently posed by the narrative are answered. The article also includes a discussion of the intelligibility of attributing questions to narratives as well as a discussion of the mechanisms that achieve this. The article concludes by addressing certain recent criticisms of the view of narrative expounded by this article.
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| | Other links: jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... If the self – as a popular view has it – is a narrative construction, if it arises out of discursive practices, it is reasonable to assume that the best possible avenue to self-understanding will be provided by those very narratives. If I want to know what it means to be a self, I should look closely at the stories that I and others tell about myself, since these stories constitute who I am. In the following I wish to question this train of thought. I will argue that we need to operate with a more primitive and fundamental notion of self; a notion of self that cannot be captured in terms of narrative structures. In a parallel move, I will argue that there is a crucial dimension of what it means to be other that is equally missed by the narrative approach. I will consequently defend the view that there are limits to the kind of understanding of self and others that narratives can provide.
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| | Other links: journals.cambridge.org cfs.ku.dk dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Traditionally, questions about consciousness and subjectivity are treated separately from questions about the self and identity. But sometimes 'the self' is spoken of as 'the subject,' which suggests that the first-person perspective may be constituted in the same way as the self. Narrative provides a powerful model of the self in contemporary psychology, philosophy of mind, and moral psychology. On some versions of narrative theory, narrative is held fundamental not only to self-understanding but to the phenomenology of the first-person point of view, too. I call this approach the narrative self-subject model. I argue that the narrative model does not apply to subjectivity, and that the narrative self should be distinguished from the 'I' of the first- person perspective. Roughly, this is because first-person narratives employ the first-person pronoun 'I' to identify some person, but the distinctive features of subjectivity are marked by a different, non-identifying use of the pronoun 'I'.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... This article analyzes the concept of narrative.How do we recognize a narrative when we seeone? Which criteria do we or should we apply?The article itself serves as a (possible)example of a narrative, and is thus adiscussion of itself as a narrative product. Ialso discuss the possible narrative structureof the process leading up to the completedarticle. I first discuss two approaches tocategorization and the most commonly referredto criteria for identifying narratives. Next Idiscuss various roles found in narratives andthe roles found in the current article. FinallyI discuss the problems principally involved inpunctuation of sequences and thus in decidingwhich narrative we are dealing with. Itis concluded that the categorization criteriaare too vague to perform the job they areintended to do.
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| | Other links: dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Michel Foucault's ethics of embodiment, focusing upon care of the self, has motivated feminist scholars to pursue promising models of embodied resistance to disciplinary normalization. Cressida Heyes, in particular, has advocated that these projects adopt practices of “somaesthetics,” following a program of body consciousness developed by Richard Shusterman. In exploring Shusterman's somaesthetics proposal, I find that it does not account for the subjective challenges of resisting normalization. Based on narrative theories of subjectivity, the role narrative plays in normalization, and a commitment to developing concrete, feminist practices of embodied ethics, I develop a model of “narrative somaesthetics” based on an updated consciousness-raising model that emphasizes group heterogeneity and narrative conflict that deals with these challenges. Through an analysis of interviews with self-identified femme lesbians and a “female to femme” transition support group featured in the documentary film, FtF: Female to Femme, I argue that narrative somaesthetics enables the analytical, genealogical work required to identify and weaken normalization's constraints on embodied feminist ethics.
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| | Other links: dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Discussion of Richard Menary, Embodied narratives
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