Life Narratives: Prismatic World of the Author and Beyond (Editors’ Note)
Deeksha Suri | S.G.N.D. Khalsa College, University of Delhi | ORCiD ID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-2977-9543
Faizan Moquim | Jamia Milia Islamia | ORCiD ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7698-1656
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.71106/WFQN8455
Publication: Volume 5 Issue 1
Excerpt | Since 1980s, the novelty of “institutional study of narrative for its own sake,” remains in opposition “to the examination of individual narratives, narrative features, or correspondences between them” (Kreiswirth 377–78) within Social Sciences and Natural Sciences: Walter R. Fisher in “Narration as a human communication paradigm: the case of public moral argument” (1984) points out the central role of narrative in Politics and of narrative analysis in Political Sciences (Czarniawska 3); Jerome Bruner in Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986) develops a narrative mode of knowing and claims that stories are “especially viable instruments for social negotiation” (qtd. in Czarniawska 9); Donald E. Polkinghorne, in Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences (1987), likewise extends the insights around narrative into the domain of Psychology by way of his focus on plot; Louis Mink, Frank Ankersmit, and Hayden White radically question the enterprise of historiography and problematize conventions of historical representation by way of narrative discourse. In making a clarion call to engage with narrative in sociological research, Laurel Richardson in “Narrative and sociology” (1990) states that “Narrative rejuvenates the ‘sociological imagination’ in the service of liberatory civic discourses and transformative social projects” (133); in the discipline of Economics, Deirdre McCloskey (1990) observed that “Economists are tellers of stories and makers of poems, and from recognizing this we can know better what economists do” (qtd. in Czarniawska 108). Within philosophy, Alasdair MacIntyre theorizes on how social life is a narrative in After Virtue (1981); Paul Ricœur’s three-volume study Time and Narrative (1984–1988) ingeniously reinterprets Aristotle’s insight into plot and brings out temporality to bear on the complexity of narrative rhythms of life; and Charles Taylor’s Sources of Self (1989) argues that “we must inescapably understand our lives in narrative form, as a ‘quest’” (52).
Keywords | Narratives, Life Narratives, Life Writing, Autobiography, Memory, Experiencing Self, Narrative Self, Identity, Genealogy, Paul Ricœur
Deeksha Suri (deeksha.suri80@gmail.com)
Faizan Moquim (faizanmoquim@gmail.com)
MLA Citation for this Article:
Suri, Deeksha and Faizan Moquim. “Life Narratives: Prismatic World of the Author and Beyond (Editors’ Note).” Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, 7 Jan. 2022, pp. v-x, https://doi.org/10.71106/WFQN8455.