The Idea Of Time In Paul Ricoeur’s Poetics Of Narrative

Paul Ricoeur(1913-2005)is a famous phenomenological hermeneutist in France.His philosophical thoughts are profound and inclusive.Scholars at home and abroad mainly focus on phenomenology,hermeneutics,psychoanalysis,linguistic philosophy,ethics,religion,and relatively few on the study of Ricoeur’s poetics of narrative.Ricoeur’s grand philosophical thoughts opened a broader horizon for the study of his poetics of narrative.Ricoeur’s poetics of narrative covers two interwoven narrative forms: historical narrative and fictional narrative,both of which are understood and interpreted in time.This thesis explores Ricoeur’s poetics of narrative from the time dimension,and demonstrates its openness,inclusiveness and reality through the analysis of narrative texts.The main body of this thesis consists of four chapters.Chapter 1 discusses Ricoeur’s poetics of narrative systematically.Ricoeur’s narrative theory transcends traditional literary narrative theory and the former is more philosophical.Ricoeur’s thoughts contains a healthy circle of time and narrative.Chapter 2 explores three kinds of connotation of time in Ricoeur’s poetics of narrative.The cosmological time is objective and factual.The phenomenological time is subjective and psychological,and it is the time of the type of“stream of consciousness” in narrative.The historical time in narrative is formed by grafting phenomenological time onto cosmological time.Chapter 3 discusses three ways of realizing the experience of time in narrative from the author’s perspective.The spatialization of the experience of time is realized through the spatial construction of the experience of time.The ekstasis of the experience of time is achieved through the continuous return of time to the past and towards the future.The dialecticness of the experience of time is the combination of fiction and fact.Fiction means that the experience of time is unreal and it is created;fact means that the experience of time echoes the real world.Chapter 4 describes the realization of narrative time through phenomenological analysis of time in narrative.The textualization of time in narrative means time is a textualized collection of time.The readerization of time in narrative refers to the world of the reader and the world of the text intersect where the reader refigures narrative time.The realization of narrative time attempts to complete the final realization of narrative time based on textualization and readerization.In Ricoeur’s poetics of narrative,time and narrative coexist.As an abstract existence,time cannot be said directly.Only when it becomes human experience of time can it be understood and interpreted.On the level of refiguration in “threefold configuration”,readersperform the dialogue with the text and refigure the text world and the real world.In the analysis of the intentional experience,Ricoeur’s poetics of narrative goes beyond the text and goes into the possible world that the text points to.The idea of time in Ricoeur’s poetics of narrative has built a bridge between literary fiction and historical reality because it brings historical time into poetics of narrative.This makes narratology have a more solid ontological foundation on the theoretical level,and it also opens up a way for hermeneutics to accept literary fiction.