Description
Book SynopsisThe 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 enlighte
Trade Review
"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, Princeton University
“This subtle and remarkably well-sustained piece of work provides a detailed introduction to a major work of philosophy and narrative theory.” —Michael Wood, Princeton University
“Ricoeur on Time and Narrative strikes just the right balance by providing a succinct and substantive presentation of Ricoeur’s argument in Time and Narrative. . . . Teachers of Ricoeur’s work will appreciate Dowling’s ability to contextualize Ricoeur’s engagement with a wide range of his contemporaries, while scholars are likely to turn to it as a valuable reference point for their own engagements with specific issues in Ricoeur studies.” —Philosophy in Review
