“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 récit,
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 récit, Ricoeur’s last major
philosophical work. Dowling divides his discussion into six chapters,
all closely involved with specific arguments in Temps et récit:
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
