Against the backdrop of the polarized debate on the ethical significance of storytelling, Hanna Meretoja's The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible
develops a nuanced framework for exploring the ethical complexity of
the roles narratives play in our lives. Focusing on how narratives
enlarge and diminish the spaces of possibilities in which we act, think,
and re-imagine the world together with others, this book proposes a
theoretical-analytical framework for engaging with both the ethical
potential and risks of storytelling. Further, it elaborates a narrative
hermeneutics that treats narratives as culturally mediated practices of
(re)interpreting experiences and articulates how narratives can be
oppressive, empowering, or both. It also argues that the relationship
between narrative unconscious and narrative imagination shapes our sense
of the possible.

In her book, Meretoja develops a hermeneutic
narrative ethics that differentiates between six dimensions of the
ethical potential of storytelling: the power of narratives to cultivate
our sense of the possible; to contribute to individual and cultural
self-understanding; to enable understanding other lives
non-subsumptively in their singularity; to transform the narrative
in-betweens that bind people together; to develop our
perspective-awareness and capacity for perspective-taking; and to
function as a form of ethical inquiry. This book addresses our
implication in violent histories and argues that it is as dialogic
storytellers, fundamentally vulnerable and dependent on one another,
that we become who we are: both as individuals and communities.

The Ethics of Storytelling
seamlessly incorporates narrative ethics, literary narrative studies,
narrative psychology, narrative philosophy, and cultural memory studies.
It contributes to contemporary interdisciplinary narrative studies by
developing narrative hermeneutics as a philosophically rigorous,
historically sensitive, and analytically subtle approach to the ethical
stakes of the debate on the narrative dimension of human existence.