Self-Narrative and the Narrative Self

The Narrative and Cognition Lab in the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities invites you to an online and in-person talk presented by Mike Wheeler at the Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University, on 17 October 2024 12:00 - 1:30 PM with finger buffet after 1:30 PM.

In the philosophical literature on narrative and the self, the idea of implicit narrativity is revealed as being both theoretically important and deeply problematic. How so? No one could seriously doubt that the stories that we construct about ourselves figure in our cognitive processing as tools for self-interpretation, self-reflection, and self-management.

However, many philosophers have been attracted by the more radical view that self-shaping through narrative is necessary for selfhood, in the sense that selves come into being only through their being narrated. On the most obvious reading, this claim implies that coherent self-experience is always somehow narrative in form, meaning that it would be falsified by cases of coherent self-experience that are not.

In attempts to deal with what look to be such cases, a notion of implicit narrativity (or implicit narrativizing—although the difference in terms here is not innocent) has been pressed into service, but making good on this notion presents a formidable theoretical challenge. To see why, one needs to engage with the implicit-explicit distinction and with the very concept of narrativity. That done, it will be suggested that this remains a challenge worth pursuing, since even if one has no interest in saving the radical narrative view of the self, the notion of implicit narrativity is poised to contribute usefully to a range of other projects. These include our endeavors to understand: (i) the relationship between non-narrative embodied experience, episodic memory, and self-narrative; (ii) harmonious and hostile patterns of situated self-narration in relation to background socio-cultural practices; and (iii) our experience of media and artworks that, on the surface, are not narrative in form.

This event will be chaired by Dr Marco Bernini from the Narrative and Cognition Lab in the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities.