Abstract
The purpose of this chapter is to explore possible intersections between place and narrative, questioning an understanding that simply associates place with space and narrative with time and infers their separation from that. After introducing two directions from which the problem can be addressed, namely the role of place for the phenomena analyzed in terms of narrative, on the one hand, and the role of narrative for the understanding of place, on the other, the text pursues the first perspective and explores the relation between place and narrative with regard to the theory of the self, ethics, the theory of action and history. The concluding section briefly discusses the way narrative in turn contributes to the understanding of place. By showing the close relation between both terms in different philosophical problem areas, the text advocates a position that avoids the exclusion of time and history from the concept of place.
The original version of this chapter was revised. The name of the author name was misspelled and affiliation was updated in the revised version. An erratum to this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52214-2_38
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Cf. Casey 1993, 313: “place is prior only as subsisting under these most influential modern instances of the binary oppositions Western metaphysics has posited at every step of its imperialistic course.”
- 3.
An introduction defines narrative as “a basic human strategy for coming to terms with time, process, and change” (Herman 2007).
- 4.
Among continental philosophers, David Carr has argued for the latter, while Hayden White advocates the first thesis, together with many others in the field of cultural sciences; cf. White 1973.
- 5.
For a fundamental critique of the narrative approach, see Strawson 2004.
- 6.
The German translation made by Hannah Arendt herself puts even more emphasis on place in this context. There she states that “something seems to inhere every human activity which indicates that it does not ‘hover in the air’ but possesses its own place in the world”, Arendt 1981, 90 [my translation].
- 7.
Cf. Arendt 1981, 226, where she speaks of “threads” (“Fäden […], die in ein bereits vorgewebtes Muster geschlagen werden”).
- 8.
On this point, cf. Carr 2013, 46: “The moral of the story is that all the knowledge we have about the past is getting in the way of a direct connection to the past, and that this can be provided only by memory: But our memory is fading, and can be restored if we return to the ‚places’ of memory.”
- 9.
It is also worth asking whether this “symbolic” meaning is of the same kind in all of the examples or whether, for example, the meaning of a place like “Verdun” could not more appropriately be described as a metonymic relation.
- 10.
For a different approach to a possible mediation between space and time, but also between subjective and objective time/space see Ricœur 1996.
- 11.
For David Carr, place is such a rich concept especially because it contains a temporal dimension; cf. Carr 2013, 50: “Now I would like to argue that one of the things that constitutes the thickness and richness of place is that it has a temporal dimension that is entirely its own.”
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Schlitte, A. (2017). Narrative and Place. In: Janz, B. (eds) Place, Space and Hermeneutics. Contributions to Hermeneutics, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52214-2_4
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