From Ricoeur Back to Heidegger on Narrative and Self-Understanding
Abstract: A Heideggerian conception of our narrative self-understanding is compared to Paul Ricoeur’s more familiar version. Where Ricoeur’s threefold mimesis conceives of literary texts as configuring unformed temporal experience and mediating between a writer’s and reader’s understanding, the Heideggerian approach holds our orientation toward our temporal existence to be already narrative in form, though usually implicit; working…