Ricoeur Identity Analysis

Of particular importance to the present study is Ricoeur's formulation of an "offshoot issuing from the blending of history and fiction": narrative identity (1988, 3:246). Ricoeur argued that only narrative can account for the assigning of a everlasting proper name to an agent or subject, permanent from a subject's birth to death (1988, 3:246). Ricoeur claimed that one must tell a tale of a life in order to answer the question "Who...?" Therefore, the identity of this "who" must be a narrated identity (1988, 3:246). Ricoeur went far away as to say that, "Without the recourse to narration, the problem of individual identity would in fact be condemned to an antinomy with no solution" (1988, 3:246). Narrative accounts for the self-sameness of

The self of self-knowledge is the outgrowth of an examined life...(1988, 3:247).The "examined life" for Ricoeur is the life submitted to catharsis by a reading of those narratives transmitted by our culture (1988, 3:247). Our theological reflection (Chapter VIII) will discover how the Gospel story transmitted by the Christian Church regenerates our self-knowledge. Our present mission is to relate the therapeutic encounter to Ricoeur's statement that the "self of self-knowledge is the fruit of an examined life...." Instead of "narratives transmitted by our culture" as therapeutic or transformative, our present study shall focus on those narratives or stories told by the analyzed. These participant stories shall become the background where self-examination and transformation are realized. Three final elements from Time and Narrative elucidate the role of narrative identity in

In the end, he suggests, the only significance that history can have is the kind that a narrative imagination gives to it. The secret of the process by which consciousness invests history with meaning resides in "the content of the form," In the way our narrative capacities transforms the present into a accomplishment of a past from which we would wish to have desceneded. Three sets of essays form this collection: one set on analyzing history as narrative and the content inherent in the form, one set looking at the ideologies that came to form the regulation of history in the nineteenth century, and one set that critiques/analyzes some heroes of white's: foucault, jameson, ricoeur. Our historiography course liked the last essay (which provides a semiological reading of The Education of Henry Adams) the best. Given - History is a collection of recorded proceedings. Given - The events of history are written down by a human. Given - Every event in history is not recorded, only those of note.What does this mean? It means history is a structured narrative. It means that someone chooses what events we remember. It means the past is flavored by the perspective of its author. History is nearer to art than it is to science. History is a representation of events, never, because the act of writing does not