More here on producing online narratives of the self - ah now this is beginning to feel like an obsession! Anyway on my blog I recently reviewed an article that referred to ‘digital selfhood’ and began to problematise the kinds of self-narratives we perform on blogs. I suggested the idea of identity-editing and commodifying the self. It also occured to me that we might frame our stories in relation to popular narratives and lifestyle discources, and in this way Ricoeur’s essay ‘Life in Quest of Narrative’ is useful.
…we never cease to reinterpret the narrative identity that constitutes us, in the light of narratives proposed to us by our culture. In this sense, our self-understanding presents the same features of traditionality as the understanding of a literary work. It is in this way we learn to become the narrator and the hero of our own story, without actually becoming the author of our own life. We can apply to ourselves the concept of narrative voices….
Ricoeur 1991: 32
I really like this perspective, but there’s one bit that puzzles me. What exactly does he mean when he says ‘the same features of traditionality’ - I don’t quite get the ‘traditionality’ bit. Anyway the essay is in On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation edited by Wood (1991)
