Ricoeur’s Legacy: From Plot to Experienciality

Workshop at Basel University organized by Raphaël Baroni and Adrien Paschoud

In Time and Narrative (1983-1985), Ricœur asserts that both fiction and historiography, though formally divergent, reconfigure our experience of time through an operation of “emplotment”, thus underlining the bond, but also the gap, between experience and plot. By doing so, Ricœur has probably highlighted one of the most crucial anthropological functions of both fictional and non-fictional narrativity. In that respect, Ricœur’s magnum opus has undoubtedly fed the « narrative turn» (Kreiswirth 1995), and, more generally, has impacted social and human sciences. In the recent developments of narrative theory, this perspective has spread beyond literary genres and historiography, and beyond phenomenology and hermeneutics, which remained at the core of Ricœur’s Time and Narrative. These theoretical developments in the field of rhetoric, cognitive and transmedial narratologies make new issues arise. What is the relationship between emplotment and immersive experience? What are the enrichments or distortions that narratives confer to the mediated experience? Conversely, what are the vectors whose function is to reduce the gap between simulated and direct experiences? What are the anthropological functions of immersion and emplotment? What are the differences between factual and fictional narratives with regard to the narrative mediation of experience? Are immersion and emplotment necessary ingredients of narrativity, or are they only features of a sub-category of narratives that could be defined as “mimetic”? This workshop is intended todeepen our knowledge on emplotment in the perspective of Ricœur’s seminal work and of most recent debates on narrative.

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