Understanding how we understand: the role of metahermeneutics in narrative analysis and teaching

Abstract

Abstract This article aims to take an interesting theoretical issue – namely diversity of interpretation and its thematization in metahermeneutics – as a point of departure for an innovative exercise on interpreting narratives in professional contexts as well as in the classroom. We build on Liesbeth Korthals Altes’s idea that readers attribute an ethos (of, for example, sincerity, reliability, authority, or irony) to characters, narrators, and authors, and try to make it more specific in two ways. First, we argue that ethos attributions depend upon the psychological and emotional predispositions that readers bring to the narrative through prior experiences, but also their specific positionality. Theoretical concepts that are useful in this context are Marco Caracciolo’s notion of the experiential background and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectional categories, both of which differ from reader to reader. Second, we argue that individual narrative techniques in the text must also be considered if we want to understand how readers construct the meaning of a given narrative. In other words, readers do not only attribute an ethos (i.e., values, beliefs, or world views) to characters, narrators, and authors but also to narrative techniques such as paratextual features, intertextual references, the plot development, or aspects of the storyworld. We offer the categories of retrospective relations , prospective relations , and speculative relations as features of the relatability of the experiences rendered through narratives. The individual realizations of experiential relatability are an important factor for explaining the reasons behind different interpretations of texts. The article also contains a qualitative case study, which involves a discussion of different interpretations against the foil of experiential backgrounds and intersectional identity categories, as an example of the kind of metahermeneutic exercise we have in mind.