1st Edition

Storytelling and Ethics Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative

Edited By Hanna Meretoja, Colin Davis Copyright 2018
    324 Pages
    by Routledge

    324 Pages 16 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    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.

    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

    Biography

    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.

    "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 Rüggemeier, Diegesis