"The object of this book," writes William C. Dowling in his
preface, "is to make the key concepts of Paul Ricoeur's "Time and
Narrative" available to readers who might have felt bewildered by
the twists and turns of its argument." The sources of puzzlement
are, he notes, many. For some, it is Ricoeur's famously indirect
style of presentation, in which the polarities of argument and
exegesis seem so often and so suddenly to have reversed themselves.
For others, it is the extraordinary intellectual range of Ricoeur's
argument, drawing on traditions as distant from each other as
Heideggerian existentialism, French structuralism, and
Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Yet beneath the labyrinthian
surface of Ricoeur's "Temps et recit," Dowling reveals a single
extended argument that, though developed unsystematically, is meant
to be understood in systematic terms."Ricoeur on Time and
Narrative"presents that argument in clear and concise terms, in a
way that will be enlightening both to readers new to Ricoeur and
those who may have felt themselves adrift in the complexities of
"Temps et recit, " Ricoeur's last major philosophical work. Dowling
divides his discussion into six chapters, all closely involved with
specific arguments in "Temps et recit" on mimesis, time,
narrativity, semantics of action, poetics of history, and poetics
of fiction. Additionally, Dowling provides a preface that lays out
the French intellectual context of Ricoeur's philosophical method.
An appendix presents his English translation of a personal
interview in which Ricoeur, having completed "Time and Narrative,
"looks back over his long career as an internationally renowned
philosopher. "Ricoeur on Time and Narrative"""communicates to
readers the intellectual excitement of following Ricoeur's
dismantling of established theories and arguments--Aristotle and
Augustine and Husserl on time, Frye and Greimas on narrative
structure, Arthur Danto and Louis O. Mink on the nature of
historical explanation--while coming to see how, under the pressure
of Ricoeur's analysis, these ideas are reconstituted and revealed
in a new set of relations to one another.
"The scholarship in William C. Dowling's "Ricoeur on Time and
Narrative"" "is impeccable; Dowling knows Ricoeur inside out. He
highlights Ricoeur's most important arguments, presents them in a
limpid, concise language, and links them to the relevant
nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophical developments.
Dowling's book provides us with a lucid, intelligible version of
Ricoeur's major work, one that will be of considerable significance
to philosophers, historians, and literary theorists." --Thomas
Pavel, Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor of French
Literature, and the Committee on Social Thought, University of
Chicago"William C. Dowling's "Ricoeur on Time and Narrative"""is a
subtle and remarkably well-sustained piece of work. It provides a
detailed introduction to a major work of philosophy and narrative
theory--already a considerable achievement, given the difficulty of
Ricoeur's text. However, Dowling also shows us, sometimes
explicitly, sometimes simply through the way he conducts his
argument, why we should bother with Ricoeur--what we have to gain
from knowing him better than we do, however well we may think we
know him." --Michael Wood, Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923
Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Princeton
University
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