Introduction

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 1 situates the book within current scholarly debate on the ethical significance of narrative for human existence. It articulates the need for a framework that allows one to explore the ethical complexity of the roles that narratives play in human lives by acknowledging both their ethical potential and risks. It outlines narrative hermeneutics as an approach that enables an analysis of how narratives enlarge and diminish the space of possibilities in which people act, think, experience, and reimagine the world together with others. The chapter maps the trajectory and key concepts of the project, including narrative unconscious and narrative imagination, the relation of which crucially defines one’s sense of the possible. It explains how the book draws on, brings together, and contributes to the following fields: (1) narrative ethics, (2) literary narrative studies and ethical criticism, (3) philosophy of narrative, (4) narrative psychology, and (4) cultural memory studies.