Overview

In recent years there has been a huge amount of both popular and academic interest in storytelling as something that is an essential part of not only literature and art but also our everyday lives as well as our dreams, fantasies, aspirations, historical self-understanding, and political actions. The question of the ethics of storytelling always, inevitably, lurks behind these discussions, though most frequently it remains implicit rather than explicit. This volume explores the ethical potential and risks of storytelling from an interdisciplinary perspective. It stages a dialogue between contemporary literature and visual arts across media (film, photography, performative arts), interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives (debates in narrative studies, trauma studies, cultural memory studies, ethical criticism), and history (traumatic histories of violence, cultural history). The collection analyses ethical issues involved in different strategies employed in literature and art to narrate experiences that resist telling and imagining, such as traumatic historical events, including war and political conflicts. The chapters explore the multiple ways in which the ethics of storytelling relates to the contemporary arts as they work with, draw on, and contribute to historical imagination. The book foregrounds the connection between remembering and imagining and explores the ambiguous role of narrative in the configuration of selves, communities, and the relation to the non-human. While discussing the ethical aspects of storytelling, it also reflects on the relevance of artistic storytelling practices for our understanding of ethics. Making an original contribution to interdisciplinary narrative studies and narrative ethics, this book both articulates a complex understanding of how artistic storytelling practices enable critical distance from culturally dominant narrative practices, and analyzes the limitations and potential pitfalls of storytelling.

Full Product Details

Author:   Hanna Meretoja (University of Turku, Finland) ,  Colin Davis (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK)
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint:   Routledge
Weight:   0.600kg
ISBN:  

9780367667481

ISBN 10:   0367667487
Pages:   314
Publication Date:   30 September 2020
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly ,  Undergraduate
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us.

Table of Contents

"Chapter 1: Introduction: Intersections of Storytelling and Ethics Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis Part I: The ethical potential and limits of narrative Chapter 2: Truth, Ethics, Fiction: Responding to Plato’s Challenge Colin Davis Chapter 3: Is there an Ethics to Story-Telling? Mieke Bal Chapter 4: Forms of Ordering: Trauma, Narrative and Ethics Robert Eaglestone Chapter 5: The Decline of Narrative and the Rise of the Archive Ernst van Alphen Chapter 6: The Story of the ""Anthropos"": Writing Humans and Other Primates in Contemporary Fiction Danielle Sands Chapter 7: From Appropriation to Dialogic Exploration: A Non-Subsumptive Model of Storytelling Hanna Meretoja Part II: Narrative temporalities: imagining an other life Chapter 8: Alexander Kluge’s ""Saturday in Utopia"": Making Time for Other Lives with German Critical Theory and Heliotropic Narration Leslie A. Adelson Chapter 9: Melancholy and the Narration of Transnational Trauma in W.G. Sebald and Teju Cole Kaisa Kaakinen Chapter 10: Memory as Imagination in Elina Hirvonen’s When I Forgot Riitta Jytilä Chapter 11: Popular Representation of East Germany: Whose History is it? Molly Andrews Chapter 12: Realities in the Making: The Ethics of Fabulation in Observational Documentary Cinema Ilona Hongisto Part III: Narrative engagements with violence and trauma Chapter 13: The Empathetic Listener and the Ethics of Storytelling Aleida Assmann Chapter 14: Theatre, Ethics and Restitution: What is Theatre Good For? Anna Reading Chapter 15: Towards an Intercultural Aesthetics: Shaping the Memory of Political Violence and Historical Trauma in Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s Artwork Where is Where? Mia Hannula Chapter 16: Reading Terror: Imagining Violent Acts through the Rational or Narrative Sublime Cassandra Falke Chapter 17: War & Storytelling After 9/11: A Photojournalist’s Perspective Louie Palu Part IV: Concluding reflections Chapter 18: Narrative in Dark Times Andreea Deciu Ritivoi"

Reviews

Thinking of the empathetic listener as secondary witness (Assmann), the assemblage of restitution (Reading), the heterogeneous temporalities of the present (Kaakinen) and subsumptive vs. non-subsumptive storytelling (Meretoja) as well as many other tools for thought and analysis introduced and developed in this volume, it becomes clear that Storytelling and Ethics has indeed brought together new vocabularies for articulating how literary and other artistic narratives open new possibilities of thought and experiences. - Anne Ruggemeier, Diegesis

Author Information

Colin Davis is Professor of French at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. 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.

Tab Content 6

Author Website:  

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

No review item found!

Add your own review!

Countries Available

All regions