Second session (15:30-17:30) | Back to programme
By Hanna Meretoja
In this paper, I propose a model for analyzing and evaluating narratives from an ethical perspective. The model draws on narrative hermeneutics and is meant to be applicable in the analysis of different types of narratives across disciplines. I will briefly outline some of the basic tenets of a hermeneutic approach to narrative, particularly emphasizing how narrative hermeneutics allows us to acknowledge, first, how narratives are value-laden and, second, how narratives shape our values. Then, in the latter part of the paper, I will develop a model of hermeneutic narrative ethics that differentiates between six dimensions of the ethical potential and dangers of narratives and provides six evaluative continuums on which narratives can be placed when we engage in their ethical evaluation. The model invites us to consider whether narratives expand or diminish our “sense of the possible”; cultivate or impede individual and cultural self-understanding; enable or block understanding others non-subsumptively in their singularity; contribute to inclusive or exclusive narrative in-betweens; develop or impair our perspective-awareness and capacity for perspective-taking; and function as a form of ethical inquiry or reinforce dogmatism. The paper proposes these evaluative continuums not as binaries but as heuristic tools that can be used in context-sensitive ethical evaluation of different social and cultural narrative practices.
Hanna Meretoja is Professor of Comparative Literature, Director of SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory, and Vice Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Turku (Finland). Her research is mainly in the fields of narrative theory, narrative hermeneutics, and narrative ethics. Her publications include The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory (2014, Palgrave Macmillan), Values of Literature (co-edited, 2015, Brill Rodopi), Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative (co-edited, 2017, Routledge), and The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible (Oxford University Press, 2018).
