Abstract
Narrative (the activity of narrating) occupies a central role in the social life of individuals, while also taking on the function of actualising the past to construct a perspective of the future and reshape the present social world. The real issue, however, for social science scholars is not the distinction between the telling of true stories and false ones (this seems to be a practical rather than a theoretical problem) but the value of narrativity as a way of making sense of reality—both the factual reality of real events and the moral and symbolic reality of fictions. “Narrative”, in this process, translates into the narrativity that enables individuals to know, understand and make sense of the social world, and it is through narratives and narrativity that narrative identities are constituted (integration between the two major classes of historical narratives and fictions). Narrative identity, therefore, is closely linked to memory and also shares its form. Therefore, this contribution will clarify, starting from the difference between narratives and storytelling, how narratives re-actualise the past in a future perspective since they preserve the memory of actions over time allowing them to become models to be imitated and/or surpassed.
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Notes
- 1.
Ontological narratives are the stories that individuals use to make sense of and, consequently, act in their lives (they define who individuals are). The relationship between narratives and ontology is presented as a reflexive cycle of the identities of individuals situated temporally and spatially; public narratives are those linked not to the individual but to larger social organisations (starting with the family and ending with large international institutions); conceptual narratives are all the concepts and explanations that social researchers construct through a vocabulary that can be used to reconstruct and trace in time and space the ontological narratives and relationships of individuals, as well as the public and cultural narratives that involve the lives of individuals; and, finally, metanarrativity, which constitutes all those “masternarratives” in which social individuals are included as contemporary actors within the story.
- 2.
The metaphor is a mimesis. It is the word that is sometimes translated as “imitation” others as “representation”, but always as something that makes us say that mimesis is the imitation of an action (a metaphor for reality). Ricœur breaks down the process of mimesis into three phases (mimesis1, mimesis2, and mimesis3) with the second phase (mimesis2) constituting the central node of his analysis since it is the phase that opens the individual to the world of the plot of narrative. Mimesis1 is the “pre-understanding of the world of action” and, in particular, of its intelligible structures, its symbolic elements and its temporal nature; mimesis2 is proper representation and regards the narrative function of integrating the data acquired from the world of action by transforming them into the world of text (or verb); and, finally, mimesis3 is the phase that closes the mimetic circularity and refers to the real world in which the action takes place (as opposed to mimesis1) because a new autonomous universe is re-created.
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Mangone, E. (2023). The Reasons Why the Narrative of Memory and not Storytelling: Reconstructing the Past, Present, and Future. In: Pocecco, A., Gualda, E., Mangone, E. (eds) Collective Memory Narratives in Contemporary Culture. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41921-8_1
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