A3 Vertaisarvioitu kirjan tai muun kokoomateoksen osa

The Ethical Potential and Risks of Narratives: Six Evaluative Continuums (and Sofi Oksanen’s Open Letter to Melania Trump)




TekijätMeretoja, Hanna

ToimittajaMoenandar, Sjoerd-Jeroen; van Heusden, Barend

Julkaisuvuosi2024

Kokoomateoksen nimiNarrative Values, the Value of Narratives

Sarjan nimiNarratologia

Aloitussivu23

Lopetussivu42

ISBN978-3-11-144028-6

eISBN978-3-11-144080-4

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783111440804-002

Verkko-osoitehttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783111440804-002


Tiivistelmä

This chapter proposes a model for analyzing and evaluating narratives from an ethical perspective. The model draws on narrative hermeneutics and is meant to be applicable in the analysis of different types of narratives across disciplines. The chapter briefly outlines some of the basic tenets of a hermeneutic approach to narrative, particularly emphasizing how narrative hermeneutics allows us to acknowledge, first, how narratives are value-laden and, second, how narratives shape our values. The chapter then presents a model of hermeneutic narrative ethics that differentiates between six dimensions of the ethical potential and dangers of narratives and provides six evaluative continuums as conceptual tools for their ethical evaluation. The model invites us to consider whether narratives expand or diminish our sense of the possible; cultivate or impede individual and cultural self-understanding; enable or block understanding of others non-subsumptively in their singularity; contribute to inclusive or exclusive narrative in-betweens; develop or impair perspective awareness; and function as a form of ethical inquiry or reinforce dogmatism. The chapter proposes these evaluative continuums not as binaries but as heuristic tools that can be used in context-sensitive ethical evaluation of different social and cultural narrative practices. The final part of the chapter tests the model by using it in the analysis of Sofi Oksanen’s open letter to Melania Trump.



Last updated on 2025-04-02 at 08:21