Abstract

As theorists including Paul Ricoeur, Seyla Benhabib and Martha Nussbaum have argued, it is only in narratives that the historical world is rendered intelligible, for narratives articulate the human significance of historical experience. Hannah Arendt, in particular, shows how historical narratives bring to bear the meaning of past political phenomena and thereby provide a framework with which we can make sense of the present. However, while these philosophers underscore the centrality of narratives--or, as Arendt prefers, "stories"--to political thinking, none theorizes a way to confront these stories critically. As a result, we continue to interpret the world in terms of stories, yet we lack the theoretical apparatus to integrate stories effectively into critical political thinking. ;This dissertation investigates what it can mean for stories of historical experience to contribute to critical and responsible political thinking. While Arendt's theory of storytelling serves as my point of departure, I go beyond Arendt in order to articulate a critical theory of storytelling. I argue that we can draw on stories in a critical and publicly accountable manner if we address stories as materials for our historical imagination and evaluate these according to appropriately revised versions of Kant's criteria, "enlarged thought" and "communicability." Finally, I apply this conception of storytelling to a problem in contemporary critical theory: After poststructuralist critiques of "experience," how can we meaningfully engage narratives of marginalized persons' experiences? Drawing on my Arendt-inspired theory of storytelling together with contemporary feminist theory, I account for the relations between experience, narrative and political thinking in a manner that avoids naturalizing experience, while still recognizing marginal experience narratives as resources for critical perspectives on our world