Narrative and experience: interdisciplinary methodologies between history and narratology

ABSTRACT

This introduction discusses key elements in the connections between narrative and experience from the viewpoints of narratology and historical studies. The linguistic turn and the several narrative turns have brought narratology and historiography close together, and a key concept in this development has been experience. Postclassical narratology emphasizes experientiality as the core of narrative, and new trends in historiography foreground the salience of experience in social and cultural history. We consider how historical narratives can be located and interpreted, assess cooperation between narratology and history, and suggest possible lines for further collaboration. Whereas the linguistic turn in historical scholarship has produced extensive theoretical and philosophical discussions on the premises of writing history, we aim to promote a methodological application of recent narratological approaches to history that will help to answer concrete empirical questions. Simultaneously, historical research turns out to be a useful partner for narratological analysis, providing a necessary understanding of time- and situation-bound contexts for interpreting particular narratives and even more, showing that narratological schemes and models of explanations are not universal, but historically constituted.

KEYWORDS:

• Experience
• history
• narratology

Introduction

Over the past twenty years, the so-called linguistic or cultural turn has had profound effects on history-writing. Historians have become accustomed to analysing discourses and representations, and the narrative qualities of history-writing itself in constructing the past have come under scrutiny on a daily basis.¹ At the same time, though, the debates on the linguistic turn seem to have exhausted themselves, as they are often based on very general and undefined notions of language and narrative – whereas also the literary, poststructuralist critique of historical scholarship is often based on an outdated idea of what constitutes history-writing today. As far as we see, actual methodological cooperation between historians and literary scholars remains quite rare.

In both disciplines, as we will show later in detail, the concept of experience has recently gained ever more currency. In historical research, there is an increasing interest in focusing on and conceptualizing the experiences of past agents. In narratology, experiential aspects and definitions of narrative have increased in popularity. For example, cognitive prototype theories of narrative maintain that ‘there can […] be narratives without plot, but there cannot be any narratives without a human (anthropomorphic) experiencer of some sort on some narrative level’²; or, that a maximally tellable narrative conveys what it is like to live through a disruptive experience.³ Such methodological advancements in postclassical narratology could yield novel qualitative methods for the study of the history of experience as well as new conceptions of narrativity and tellability in historical contexts.

Whereas the interest in experientiality in recent cognitive narratology brings it closer to historical and cultural studies, the very understanding of ‘experience’ it promotes can be seen as historically problematic.⁴ As noted by Monika Fludernik, one of the first proponents of experientiality as the core of all narratives, the universality of the proposed cognitivist approach raises concerns about the applicability of the theory beyond certain periods that have been studied so far. Her model of narrativisation rests on three other levels involved in narrative sense making: basic-level schemata as the real-world understanding of actions, perspectival frames from which the experience portrayed is observed, and generic and historical frames, such as genres and styles. Changes in existing frames and the emergence of new frames occur, according to Fludernik, on all other levels besides the basic real-life frames.⁵ In our effort to bring together recent developments in the study of experience in narratology and history, this view of the ahistorical basic schemata is challenged. The traditional core of narratology as a method for the detailed language-based analysis of texts provides a model for analysing particular narrative texts to complement the contextual understanding of their historical nature. The comparison of literary and historical texts is a promising field for postclassical narratology to factor in diachronic perspectives.⁶

The first phase of the ‘linguistic turn’ in history was indeed a ‘narrative turn’, in the sense of the philosophy of history, deeply rooted in claims made by Hayden White, Joan W. Scott, Quentin Skinner, Frank Ankersmit, and so on, of the philosophical or epistemological nature of history-writing itself as ‘narrative’. White, Ankersmit, and their colleagues saw history as narratives and stories, and the research of history essentially as a construction of those stories – always by someone, from some point of view and for some purpose. The subjectivity of those stories was then obvious, and, indeed, the aim of the narrativists was to critique the naive understanding of ‘objectivity’ in history.⁷ While the impact of narrativist ideas in history has been considerable, it may have been reduced by the fact that White et al. compared the subjectivity of history to a somewhat outdated image of the ‘objectivity’ of the natural sciences.⁸ The later phases of the linguistic turn have been oriented less towards the presentation and writing of history as a narrative, and more towards the study of narratives created at various points of time, by various people, for various purposes, and what a historian can find out about those pasts by studying those narratives. In the discourse of the linguistic turn, this has been interpreted as new social realism that is both a reaction against the original linguistic and narrativist turn but also a result of the ideas of language as an important part of reality.⁹

These trends have been especially strong in the fields of feminist and minority history and Marxist historiography, but they have influenced almost all social and cultural history since the 1980s. Still, it seems that when ‘narrative’ is discussed among historians, it raises two kinds of connotations – as a method of presenting (narrative) history that is also a (narrative) method of doing research in the Whitean narrativist sense on one hand, and, on the other, as an object of historical study (past narratives) that also requires a certain (narratological) method of analysis in post-linguistic-turn historiography. It may be worth noting that the articles in this theme issue emphasize these angles differently, most of them starting out with narratives as the objects of study (most clearly the articles by Toivo and Willumsen and Hatavara, Kurunmäki and Andrushchenko) but also pointing out that the results of the analysis will also be narratives which can and must be analysed as such (most clearly Kivimäki and Hyvärinen as well as Andersson and Engren).

Advances in narratology

The narrative turn is now acknowledged as several turns that each have their own understanding of narrative and narrative study. Matti Hyvärinen has recognized four turns in the interest towards narrative study: first, the turn in literary theory in the 1960s, second, the turn in historiography in the 1970s, third, the turn in the social sciences since the 1980s, and fourth, a broader cultural and societal turn towards narratives. As Hyvärinen points out, these turns do not constitute a logically advancing continuum; rather, each has its own interest towards narratives and agendas for its study.¹⁰ In literary studies, the origins of narratology result from the effort to formulate a science of narrative. Narrative was emancipated as a concept of its own from literature, and the interest was more in formulating a universal structure of all narratives than to study individual narratives. Regardless, some of the most nuanced and enduring conceptualizations of narrative features were presented in Gérard Genette’s study of Marcel Proust’s novel series, Narrative Discourse (1980/1972), a kind of culmination for structuralist narratology. Subsequent narratology, even if critical of structuralist theorizing, analytically relies on that heritage.¹¹

This structuralist narratological legacy influenced some of the early theorists of narrative in historiography in their interest in narrative form. Hayden White claims historiography resembles literature more than science due to the need to emplot history into understandable and shareable narratives. White’s earlier publications have been accused of radical scepticism towards historical knowledge, but he has later specified that historiography presents two kinds of truths: factual and figurative. What is more, he understands both historiography and literature – even modernist – to represent reality.¹² The narrative turn in history, as exemplified by White here, understood narrative as a form that is external and ideological in nature, imposed upon events.¹³ This understanding of narrative as a pre-existing structure imposed upon the past makes historiography deeply subjective for White. In the social sciences, on the contrary, the narrative turn separated from the structuralist, scientific orientation and gravitated towards the personal and the individual, in many cases also towards the experience of those understood as marginalized and silenced. Therefore, narrative was understood as an opportunity to express individual and collective experience and also to resist hegemonies. The cultural turn to narratives in many ways follows suit, and an emphasis on personal stories as cultural knowledge stresses the importance of narrative study.¹⁴ With the focus on narratology within the broader field of narrative studies, this theme number explores the potential of analysing narrative features in historical texts across historical periods. Whereas the cultural trends in narrative studies at first glance would seem closer to historical research in their emphasis on historically constituted cultural knowledge, our aim is to combine narratological tools for textual analysis with the historical study of texts.

Narratology today is often regarded as divided into classical and postclassical narratology, the classical structuralistically inspired and quite formalist in its endeavour to study both what is common to all narratives and what the features are that allow narratives to differ from one another. In contrast to this, postclassical narratology turns the interest towards the interrelations between not only linguistic form and narrative structure but most prominently world knowledge. In this model, narrative features are studied as cues for story recipients who interpret them as narratives based on their world knowledge.¹⁵ Several new perspectives have been introduced to narrative study in order to analyse forms and functions of narratives in different contexts and to disclose the cognitive, contextually situated strategies for interpretation.¹⁶ Postclassical narratology can better be understood as several narratologies – including for example transmedial, feminist, and unnatural narratology – that share the interest to diversify the field in terms of both theories and objects of study.¹⁷ Still, with the notable exception of the feminist approach, postclassical narratology has not focused on the history of narrative.¹⁸

Instead of defining narrative, postclassical narratology has aimed at identifying narrative features. David Herman, who was the first to propose postclassical narratology, has defined four basic elements of narratives: a) a narrative representation is situated, that is, it occurs on a specific occasion for telling, b) the representation is about particularized events in a structured time-course, c) the represented events introduce a disruption in the represented world, and d) the representation conveys how it feels for a human-like agent to live through the represented events.¹⁹ These elements are centred on qualia, the what it is like to live through the events, as well as on the storyworld as a mental construction and site of change. The situational telling of a narrative is included as well, together with the reference of narratives as representations. This makes narratives as cognitive tools for thinking and making sense of the world in situated contexts.

At the current state, narratology can be divided into three strands each with their way of conceptualizing narrative and focusing on their object of study. Mari Hatavara and Jarkko Toikkanen have denominated these conceptualizations to understand narrative as a cognitive tool, rhetorical act, or semiotic articulation.²⁰ The approach to narrative as a cognitive tool defines narrative as ‘a basic human strategy for coming to terms with time, process, and change’.²¹ The second approach is the rhetorical one, which defines narrative discourse as ‘verbal acts consisting of someone telling somebody else on some occasion that something happened’.²² The third is a semiotic or textual definition with an emphasis on the ‘linguistic production’ or ‘representation’ of events.²³ The cognitive approach focuses on the reader, who makes sense of the narrative organization of represented events, whereas the rhetorical is most interested in the narrator, their purpose for telling the story and the means used to persuade the audience, while the semiotic pays most attention to the qualities of the representation, its medial and semiotic phenomena.

The emphasis on cognitive processing is the dominant trend in postclassical narratologies.²⁴ This orientation has encountered criticism as well: besides the ahistorical inclination, the strong emphasis on narrative as a cognitive function a reader narrativizes into familiar scripts and models has often produced rather simplistic top-down reading models blind to the idiosyncrasies of individual narrative texts.²⁵ If classical narratology at times was too oriented towards the linguistic features of narratives, postclassical narratology is often eager to jump into interpreting cognitive parameters from textual or other semiotic signs.²⁶ Several research centres in the Nordic countries significantly contribute to the debate on narratives and the development of narratological theory.²⁷ The research conducted at Narrare: Interdisciplinary Centre for Narrative Studies at Tampere University emphasizes narrative as both action and structure: therefore, it is important to analyse the situated acts of telling together with the interpretative affordances of the stories told. Narratives as semiotic objects, be they documents produced in the past or results of the researcher’s work, are sites where the forms and functions of narrative meet.²⁸

It is important to note that were empirical narratives and their linguistic features reduced to cues that prompted the reader to imagine a storyworld, the most useful distinction for narrative analysis made in classical narratology, that between story and discourse, would be disregarded. Since the beginning, narrative has been understood in at least two ways: the story and its organization.²⁹ The story denotes the content of what is told, and the discourse the way of telling. This distinction enables empirically identifying the time of the told events and the rhetorical moment of the telling as well as operationalizing their varying relations. Consequently, the many temporal layers of historical documents and the uses of the past can be studied.

History of experiences

The advances in narratology over the past half a century can be brought to a fertile intersection with historiographical developments – especially in relation to various conceptualizations of experience. Following the more philosophical discussions in the 1970s and 1980s, the linguistic (or cultural) turn became a point of debate for practising historians at the turn of the 1990s. One of the key texts here was Joan W. Scott’s critique of using experience as evidence in historical research. She made a powerful argument against any ‘authentic’ experiences to be unearthed by historians; instead, the study should focus ‘on processes of identity production, insisting on the discursive nature of “experience” and on the politics of its construction’.³⁰

Scott’s formulation would quite naturally point towards the analysis of narrative constructions of experience. Yet the concept of experience has been difficult to integrate into the linguistic paradigm in history, as it easily represents itself as the opposite to cultural processes or a passive end-product of discourses – something that is not really needed in the linguistic analysis of texts as referring to other texts.³¹ Nevertheless, there have been several attempts to reserve an active role for experience in social and cultural history, too, and these attempts are also relevant for the ways experience and narrative intersect. In the German tradition of Erfahrungsgeschichte, drawing from the sociology of knowledge and a Koselleckian version of cultural and conceptual history, experience has been understood as a social and cultural process of giving and sharing meanings, so that the object of study for the history of experiences is rather in those semantic systems and societal meaning-making processes that construct the experience, rather than in the subjective, ‘inner’ sphere of individual reflections.³² Here, the dual nature of language as a semantic structure of meanings and, simultaneously, as an expression of individual consciousness makes it the focus for the study of experiences as a culturally mediated and socially constructed phenomenon.³³ The narratological perspective can be very fruitful here; both in its ‘classical’ form as an analysis of narrative structures and in its ‘postclassical’ form as a study of productions and receptions of narratives in different life situations, when people use them to formulate their identities, feelings, and experiences. One sustained and central area of narratology since the beginning has been the analysis of human consciousness and the mind in its entirety as represented in narratives.³⁴

Lately, at the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences at Tampere University, the study of experiences has included the societal and social emphasis of earlier German historiography, but it has also been strongly connected to the more recent advances in the history of emotions and also in the bodily, material, and practice-oriented perspectives on experiences.³⁵ As a general point of departure, experience is not seen as any authentic entity that then gets ‘represented’ or ‘expressed’ in culture. Instead, the focus is on the processes and practices of constructing experiences. There seems to be a natural link here to the study of narratives, scripts, and stories, which people use to make sense of or even live their lives – and which are also offered to people as models for experiencing. Instead of the loose usages of discourse and narrative commonplace in historiography, a more strictly narratological approach can be a step forward here, if combined with the history of experiences.

In historical research, the narrative concept of ‘script’ can be used in analysing different kinds of sources. The script offers, in a way, a model story for certain events or experiences, a model for their interpretation in the specific temporal and spatial context. The scripts are socially shared and recognized and they facilitate sharing personal experiences. ‘Cultural narratives’ can also be understood as offering resources and models for narration and the interpretation of one’s own experiences. Vice versa, people also mould and gradually transform the cultural narratives by adapting them to their own specific situations and by making their own interpretations of the cultural narratives.³⁶ Master narratives are narratives that are considered to have a hegemonic position in society. They set up actions and events as routines, and therefore normalize some event sequences over other possibilities.³⁷ In historical research, the concept has been related to the nation and national narrative. Since the nineteenth century, the national narrative has been quite consciously produced by historians, and for a long time, history was understood primarily as the history of the nation – or even as its ‘origin story’, from its birth to its current situation.³⁸ A central feature of the master narrative is that it suppresses voices that are in contradiction to it. Only certain experiences are taken in and others are left out and not, in this sense, legitimized as part of the nation.³⁹ Nevertheless, master narratives are always part of a larger narrative contestation, and their counterparts, counter-narratives, are used to express the experiences of those marginalized by the master narrative.⁴⁰

In the history of experience, David Herman’s definition of experiential narration can offer a way to grasp what it concretely means to analyse experience out of textual sources. It offers a conceptualization that can be adapted to historical sources and ‘translated’ into terms of historical inquiry. When looking at historical sources, Herman’s first element, ‘situatedness’, can be understood as the situation – i.e. the time and place – where the source is produced. In the terminology of historical research, this might be called the context of the narration. Then, ‘event sequencing’ can be translated as temporality, as interpretation of the past and expectations for the future in the source. Further, the narration of the sources can be understood as conveying a storyworld (‘worldmaking’) like in fiction, but one that is allegedly factual and located in the past. If the narration in the source is highly tellable, it also includes a rupture or a change, a ‘world disruption’. Historical sources that can be treated as experiential narration also include the ‘perspective of an experiencing mind’, hence the ‘what it’s like’ (qualia) element of experiential narration.⁴¹

Hermeneutically, narration can be seen as a way of giving meaning especially to multifaceted processes of events and experiences. In choosing the elements of the narrative and configuring them in relation to each other, the narrator gives them meaning. The circle-like interpretative relation between the elements and the whole is central.⁴² Historical research is accustomed to considering why certain things are included in the source but also what is left out – the silences of the sources, which can be as important as the things that are conveyed. When detecting what is left unsaid, one of the core skills of the historian comes into play: contextualization. What is left out has to be considered against what was possible to say in the first place in the particular historical situation.⁴³

Interest in narration and narratives in historical research has often been connected with cultural historical viewpoints on first-person narrative sources, like letters, diaries, memoirs, and autobiographies. They have been studied, for instance, as egodocuments and life writings.⁴⁴ Typically, the self has been understood as socially, relationally, and narratively constructed based on theorizations stating that narration reveals and recognizes the uniqueness of who one is (as opposed to the universalized what).⁴⁵ For instance, letters have been analysed as offering the writer the opportunity to narrate themselves but also to be narrated by the other, the recipient.⁴⁶

The construction of the self in an individual source or collection of sources can be analysed as narrations of the self. These self-narrations give meaning to past experiences and create expectations for the future. They are a way of constructing, owning and making sense of one’s experiences and of attaching and moulding them into parts of one’s self and life story. In the constant process of reinterpretation and also in different situations, it is possible to emplot one’s life and experiences in multiple different ways, as it is possible to configure the narrative differently from the same events.⁴⁷ Often, the self-narrations of the sources are quite fragmentary, like in letters, court records, and other official documents, but sometimes there can be a rather conscious attempt to create a life story, like in memoirs. Nevertheless, the fragmentary self-narrations also get their meaning in relation to the larger context of the life story even if it is not explicitly present. The historian’s task can be to analyse why the person has chosen to narrate themselves in a particular way in the particular historical situation.⁴⁸

In addition to the first-person viewpoint, it is of interest to historical research to consider collective production and the narration of experiences. In addition, in narratology, the concept of we-narratives has recently gained currency.⁴⁹ This theme issue explores the possibilities of expanding the usage of narrative methodologies and approaches from first-person narrations to a broader range of historical sources.

Narratology and history: opportunities for cooperation

As David Herman was coining his vision of postclassical narratology in the form of ‘socionarratology’, he recognized the need to draw from theoretical models of ethnography, linguistics, and cognitive sciences; however, he did not mention historiographical research, only historiographical representation.⁵⁰ Furthermore, Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik understand the contextual orientation in postclassical narratology to mean extending narrative analysis from literary texts to non-literary narratives and many media. But even though the thematic trend in postclassical narratology utilizes feminist, ethnic, and postclassical analysis, a historical orientation as such seems to be mostly lacking.⁵¹ The problem already pointed out in the ahistorical understanding of cognitive schemata that are the basis of narrativisation also applies to how postclassical narratology tends to understand world knowledge. It can even be argued that postclassical narratology, in its understanding of world knowledge primarily as ‘stored in cognitive schemata called frames and scripts’, is insensitive to the historical condition even if it emphasizes the ‘real-world knowledge’ central to narrative analysis.⁵² Context-sensitivity is emphasized in narratology, as ‘possible effects [narratives] may engender in the real world’,⁵³ but we suggest this traffic between narratives and the ‘real world’ should be studied in both directions. It is also crucial to study how the ‘real world’ affects narratives. This world is historically and culturally diverse, and therefore readers with their ‘cognitive schemata’ based on personal experience also need information on past realities to accurately interpret historical narratives.

The past realities – social, cultural, material, and physical – appear to a modern scholar as narrated, but they also condition the narratives themselves. Therefore those conditions need to be understood in order to study and interpret the narratives. It seems that narratology can benefit from historical scholarship that situates the given narratives ‘in the thick of things’ and explains particular narrative choices and forms as historically contingent. Diachronic narratology has been established to study the historical changes of narrative forms,⁵⁴ but it could benefit from a closer cooperation with the historical insight of cultural and social circumstances. What is more, some concepts in narratology require knowledge of the historical context in order to be applicable. For example, whether a script can be considered a master or a counter narrative is not deducible from the intrinsic narrative qualities of the text. In order to be able to designate a narrative as mastering or countering something, the researcher needs to be able to recognize the societal and cultural norms and power relations in the historical context where the narrative is used.

Discussions of the relations between history and narratology have long concentrated on history-writing or historiography, the end product of research, as narrative. However, this theme issue is interested in the relationship between historical research and narratology on another level: it explores the ways in which historical sources can be considered and analysed as narratives and with narratological methods for textual analysis. We expose the need for detailed, empirically based historical knowledge required for postclassical narratology to fully understand the contextual, situated nature of narratives and storytelling. Diachronic narratology has so far focused on how narrative structures and forms such as mind representation have changed over history,⁵⁵ but we emphasize the importance of the historical situation and conditions in the analysis and interpretation of particular narratives.

This theme issue brings together historians and narratologists to find a common ground for theoretical and methodological development in the study of experience between the disciplines, and to use these approaches to analyse empirical cases in the context of Nordic history. The articles apply a narrative-theoretical methodology to a historically relevant research question and historical source material; each article also brings a historical method of explanation to the use of narratologists. The purpose hereby is to demonstrate the wide applicability of narratological approaches to very different historical eras and research settings across the Nordic historiographical context. Each paper presents a collaboration between historians and narratologists. The articles include a wide range of historical periods and materials in order to show the range of possibilities of the narratological approaches but also of the challenges posed by different historical materials.

The theme issue starts with Sari Katajala-Peltomaa and Maria Mäkelä’s study of conversion exempla in two contexts seemingly distant from each other: fourteenth-century hagiographic materials from the Vadstena monastery and present-day social media sources. The comparison turns out to be fruitful, as there are clear analogies in the logic of conversion stories, but also distinct differences in how the authority of these didactic narratives is constituted. In Liv Helene Willumsen and Raisa Maria Toivo’s article on witchcraft trials in Northern Norway and Southwestern Finland in the seventeenth century, the temporal context is roughly the same, but the different societal contexts cause very different outcomes. The study shows how experiences are both constructed and evaluated through narratives, how these narratives are built communally, and how the witchcraft confessions aligned to expected scripts. Greger Andersson and Jimmy Engren’s article discusses Selma Lagerlöf’s and Vilhelm Moberg’s historical novels and point out that narrative forms may be shared across historical and literary narratives, but the uses and interpretations of narrative differ depending on the narrative environments. What is more, the same linguistic features gain different functions in fiction and history. Ville Kivimäki and Matti Hyvärinen study the articulation of a master narrative in Finland during the Second World War by examining texts produced by historians for army propaganda. Written in a sublime register and resorting to detailed chronicling, these texts are different from today’s idea of a ‘good story’ and point to a historically changing culture of proper and efficient narratives. Mari Hatavara, Jussi Kurunmäki, and Mykola Andrushchenko analyse how the collapse of the Soviet Union was discussed in Finnish Parliamentary talk from 1980 until today. The article offers a historical case of narrative contestation and the political uses of the past thereby; it argues that the combination of narratological and historical understandings of events as interpretative turning points is crucial to the study of historical experience. Finally, the article demonstrates the new possibilities of utilizing large digital corpuses in combining history and narratology.

Taken together, the articles show that the changing historical contexts matter in explaining different narratives – but also that it is both possible and fruitful to find analogous narrative situations, usages, authors, and audiences over long time spans. Scripts and stories remain highly relevant for the history of experiences that seeks to understand how people make sense of their life events and how people’s experiences are socially and culturally constructed. Narratology can be an essential partner in this enterprise especially due to its conceptualizations of narrative and methods for detailed textual analysis. These methods can be used both to detect narratives and narrative features in documents and to interpret their functions. In the same way, the articles show that for narratology focusing on experience linked with world knowledge, historians can provide expertise and sources for situating these experiences in their proper context in time and place. The theme issue at hand is an opening for a continuing cooperation, and we believe that the articles will be helpful as applicable methodological developments – also outside of their Nordic framework.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Academy of Finland [Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences; Voices of Democracy 2017, no. 308792/326512; Instrumental Narratives 2018-2022, no. 314768]; Suomen Kulttuurirahasto [00210279]; Svenska Litteratursällskapet i Finland [3904].

Notes on contributors

Reetta Eiranen

Reetta Eiranen is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences (HEX) at Tampere University, Finland. Lately, she has worked as a Visiting Researcher at the Center for the History of Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin. Her research interests include the histories of experience, emotions, gender and nationalism. Theoretically, she specializes in hermeneutical and narrative approaches to experience.

Mari Hatavara

Mari Hatavara is Professor of Finnish Literature and director of Narrare: Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies at Tampere University, Finland. Her research interests include interdisciplinary narrative theory and analysis, fictionality studies, intermediality and the poetics of historical fiction and metafiction. She specializes in the analysis of narrative voices across fictional and non-fictional narrative environments. Hatavara is coeditor of The Travelling Concepts of Narrative (2013), Narrative Theory, Literature, and New Media (2015), and special issues on Narrating Selves in Everyday Contexts (Style 2017), Narrating Selves from the Bible to Social Media (Partial Answers 2019) and Real Fictions: Fictionality, Factuality and Narrative Strategies in Contemporary Storytelling (Narrative Inquiry 2019).

Ville Kivimäki

Ville Kivimäki is Senior Research Fellow and leader of the Lived Nation research team at the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences at Tampere University, Finland. He specializes in the social and cultural history of the Second World War and its aftermath, and in the intertwined histories of trauma, gender, nationalism, experience and emotions. Kivimäki has co-edited, for instance, Finland in World War II: History, Memory, Interpretations (with Tiina Kinnunen, Brill 2012), Lived Nation as the History of Experiences and Emotions in Finland, 1800–2000 (with Sami Suodenjoki and Tanja Vahtikari, Palgrave, 2021), and Trauma, Experience and Narrative in Europe During and After World War II (with Peter Leese, Palgrave, 2021).

Maria Mäkelä

Maria Mäkelä, PhD, is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature and the former director (2016–2020) of Narrare: Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies at Tampere University, Finland. Currently she heads two research projects: Instrumental Narratives consortium (2018-2022) and Storytelling in Information Systems Development (2019-2022). Her latest publications include Routledge Companion for Narrative Theory (2022) co-edited with Paul Dawson and Poetics Today special issue ‘Critical Approaches to the Storytelling Boom’ (2022) co-edited with Hanna Meretoja.

Raisa Maria Toivo

Raisa Maria Toivo is Professor of History at Tampere University and the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence for the History of Experience. Her publications include Lived Religion and Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (with Sari Katajala-Peltomaa, Routledge 2021) and Faith and Magic in Early Modern Finland (Palgrave Macmillan 2016). Currently, she works on the history of experience in lived religion, witchcraft, gender and violence.

Notes

1. For the breakthrough of the linguistic turn in Finland and Sweden, see Partti, Taking the Language.

2. Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, 13.

3. Herman, Basic Elements of Narrative, 9.

4. The ahistoricity of the cognitive narratological notion of experience in the work of Monika Fludernik and others has been challenged by Hanna Meretoja in her work on narrative hermeneutics, see, e.g. Meretoja, The Ethics of Storytelling, 8.

5. Fludernik, “Natural Narratology and Cognitive Parameters,” 243−244, 257.

6. Fludernik, “The Diachronization of Narratology,” 332.

7. For an overview, see Clark, History, Theory, Text; and Partti, “Tieteellisiä siirtymiä ja paradigmamuutoksia.”

8. Apajalahti and Hannula, “Historiantutkimuksen tieteellisyydestä.” See also Paul and van Veldhuizen, “A Retrieval of Historicism”; and Kuukkanen, Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography.

9. Hunt, Writing History.

10. Hyvärinen, “Revisiting the Narrative Turns,” 72–77; and Hyvärinen, “Travelling Metaphors.”

11. Herman, “Narratologies,” 1–2.

12. White, Tropics of Discourse; Metahistory; Figural Realism; “Historical Discourse.”

13. Hyvärinen, “Revisiting the Narrative Turns,” 74.

14. Hyvärinen, “Revisiting the Narrative Turns,” 75–77.

15. Herman, “Scripts, Sequences, and Stories,” 1048.

16. Herman, “Narratologies,” 9, 12–13.

17. Herman, “Narratologies,” 1–3, 21; and Alber and Fludernik, “Introduction,” 1–2, 6.

18. Fludernik, “The Diachronization of Narratology,” 331−332.

19. Herman, Basic Elements of Narrative, 14.

20. Hatavara and Toikkanen, “Sameness and Difference,” 134–136.

21. Herman et al., “Introduction,” ix.

22. Smith, “Narrative Versions,” 228; cf. Phelan, Living to Tell.

23. Genette, Narrative Discourse, 30; Prince, Narratology, 4; and cf. Ryan, “Narrative.”

24. Chatman, Story and Discourse; and Björninen, Hatavara, and Mäkelä, “Narrative as Social Action.”

25. See Lehtimäki, Karttunen, and Mäkelä, “Preface,” ix–xi.

26. Hatavara, “Making Sense in Autobiography,” 166–167.

27. The Nordic Network of Narrative Studies (funded by NordForsk 2007–2011), directed by Marina Grishakova from Tartu University, strengthened the cooperation between centres at Tartu, Tampere, Southern Denmark, Aarhus, Oslo, Trondheim, Tromsø, Örebro, Linköping, and Stockholm.

28. Björninen, Hatavara, and Mäkelä, “Narrative as Social Action”; Hyvärinen, Hatavara and Rautajoki, “Positioning”; Hatavara and Teräs, “Minä, Kekkonen”; and Hatavara and Teräs, “Kerrottu Vennamo.”

29. Rimmon-Kenan, “Concepts of Narrative.”

30. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” 797.

31. For an overview on these discussions at the turn of the millennium, see Jay, Songs of Experience. Furthermore, the question of experience looms large in collective efforts to look beyond the cultural turn around the same time, see e.g. Bonnell and Hunt, eds, Beyond the Cultural Turn; Spiegel, ed., Practicing History.

32. For this tradition, see especially Buschmann and Carl, eds, Die Erfahrung des Krieges; and Schild and Schindling, eds, Kriegserfahrungen.

33. Reimann, Der große Krieg, 10–13.

34. Cohn, Transparent Minds; and Herman, The Emergence of Mind.

35. For the diversity of perspectives, see Annola, Kivimäki, and Malinen, eds, Eletty historia; Katajala-Peltomaa and Toivo, Lived Religion; Katajala-Peltomaa and Toivo, eds, Histories of Experience; Kivimäki, Suodenjoki, and Vahtikari, eds, Lived Nation; Kivimäki and Leese, eds, Trauma, Experience and Narrative. Experience has also been conceptualized in multidisciplinary contexts, e.g. Kokemuksen tutkimus -verkosto [Network for the Study of Experience], https://kokemus.wordpress.com/, Toikkanen and Virtanen, Kokemuksen tutkimus VI.

36. Barclay, Love, Intimacy and Power, 29; Biron-Ouellet and Nagy, “A Collective Emotion,” 135–145; Herman, “Scripts, Sequences, and Stories,” 1047; Meretoja, “On the Use and Abuse,” 82–83; and Ricœur, “Life in Quest of Narrative,” 32–33.

37. Bamberg, “Considering Counter Narratives,” 360.

38. Cf. the use of ‘Finnish history’ as such a script in Haapala, “Lived Historiography.”

39. See e.g. Berger and Lorenz, “Introduction.”

40. Hyvärinen, Hatavara, and Rautajoki, “Positioning.”

41. Herman, Basic Elements of Narrative, 9, 157; and Eiranen, Lähisuhteet ja nationalismi, 41–42.

42. See e.g. Meretoja, “On the Use and Abuse,” 82–83; and Ricœur, “Life in Quest of Narrative,” 21–22.

43. Cf. Winter, “Thinking about silence”; and Kivimäki, “Sodanjälkeisiä hiljaisuuksia.”

44. Keravuori, Saaristolaisia, 13–23; and Summerfield, Histories of the Self.

45. Cavarero, Relating Narratives; and Fulbrook and Rublack, “In Relation.”

46. Leskelä-Kärki, “Narrating Life Stories,” 329–330.

47. Ritivoi, “Identity and Narrative,” 231–232; and Ricœur, “Life in Quest of Narrative,” 32–33.

48. See e.g. Depkat, ”Autobiographie.”

49. See e.g. Bekhta, We-Narratives; special issue “We-Narratives and We-Discourses.”

50. Herman, “Narratologies,” 21–23.

51. Alber and Fludernik, “Introduction,” 2–5.

52. Ibid., 11.

53. Ibid., 11–12, 22.

54. Fludernik, “The Diachronization of Narratology.”

55. See Fludernik, The Fictions of Language; Herman, The Emergence of Mind.