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Narrative and Literary Text as a Source of Self-Knowledge and Self-Cognition
Abstract
The paper concerns the cognitive function of literature. I show that literary stories, because of their narrative and mimetic structure, enable us to identify with fictitious heroes, and thus become able to widen our cognitive as well as moral horizon, and to influence our own life-stories. In such a process, we receive the opportunity to re-tell and re-think our personal narration and in such a way learn who we really are and what it means to be ourselves. In order to demonstrate this, I refer to Martha Nussbaum‘s and Wayne C. Booth‘s ethical criticism on the one hand, and to Paul Ricoeur’s, Alasdair MacIntyre’s, Charles Taylor’s, Marya Schechtman’s and David DeGrazia’s theory of narrative identity on the other. I argue that such a mutual exchange between the reader’s identity and a fictional character is possible as both of them have a narrative structure and are sort of a story.
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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17951/kw.2016.20.15
Date of publication: 2017-05-08 13:08:08
Date of submission: 2017-02-21 16:51:31
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