Posts tagged ‘Narrative’

  1. What is figuration?

    6 min read

    What's in a story?

  2. The Surface and the Depths: Characters, Character and Stories

    20 min read

    Along with plot, characters are essential elements of stories. Seems straightforward, right?

  3. The Limits of Narrative

    16 min read

    Your story. My Story. Our Story. There’s a story behind everything, it seems. But is it actually a story? The language of narrative and narrative interpretation sometimes gets hijacked or pushed too far and encroaches on the territory of other ways of speaking. There are limits to narrative.

  4. How (not) to Understand a Story

    14 min read

    When reading and writing stories, it is tempting to use a system to reduce the story to a structure. It’s beguiling, but it is fundamentally problematic. Beware!

  5. Time, Narrative and the Aporetic

    6 min read

    Narrated time changes the structure of the cosmos, making its shape more human

  6. Paul Ricoeur’s Mimetic Narrativity, in Summary

    7 min read

    Pulling together the threads of Ricoeur’s theory of narrative: prefiguration, configuration, refiguration.

  7. Refiguration, Understanding and Transformation

    19 min read

    Refiguration is the third movement of narrative, the stage in which a story is restored to the real world of action and suffering. It is in the reader that the story reaches its conclusion.

  8. Configuration and Narrative Emplotment

    7 min read

    Configuration is the second moment of mimetic narrative, all about emplotment — about characters, events and the point of a story as a whole, about following the rules and transgressing them too.

  9. Prefiguration and Narrative Competence

    13 min read

    Paul Ricoeur’s mimetic narratology sees three moments in narratives. Mimesis 1, prefiguration, is the first moment, all about our pre-existing experience and our expectations.