Narrative Thinking and Experiential Knowledge: The Example of Ronald Sukenick

Abstract

Post-humanist discourses, by undermining the disinterested subject as the basis for conceptual knowledge, have brought narrative to the forefront of political thinking. Indicative of the revaluing of narrative thinking is the increasing prominence of the work of Hannah Arendt, for whom storytelling is the primary task of political theory and the source of political concepts.1 For Arendt, though, rather traditional notions of narrative still prevail. As Robert C. Pirro shows in his Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy, the structure of Greek tragedy informs Arendt's narrative strategies and perhaps her political thinking as a whole in fundamental ways. However, Eric B. Gorham, in The Theater of Politics: Hannah Arendt, Political Science and Higher Education, suggests that Arendt's notion of political freedom might be at least as well served through the appropriation of other, more innovative modes of storytelling. Noting that Arendt's assumption of the validity of traditionally plotted narratives relies upon her claim that the creation of the work of art involves the concealment of