Life narratives and literary narratives

From metacriticism to the philosophy of personal identity

Abstract

It is common to think of our life stories, individual and collective, in the form of narratives. So, from autobiographies to everyday life conversations, we make stories of our experiences, tell what happens to us, figure out why, and even entertain the ways of narrating ourselves for fun. Our common sense presupposes, however, a certain reduction of the narrative to a specific type of narrative, i.e., the literary narrative. Two philosophical questions have opened two debates about that assumption. First, the literary interpretation would be analogous to the modes of interpretation in psychoanalysis, which intends to illuminate both the nature of literary and psychoanalytic understanding. Second, the constitution of personal identity would be literary, a matter on which literary humanism depends. The objective of this article is to make explicit the problems from that assumption.