In the Ruins of Story? Toward an Aporetic Narrative Inquiry

• In Event: 43.056 - Critical Narrative Perspectives

Abstract

This paper is intended to provoke dialogue regarding the situation of narrative within qualitative inquiry’s current moment of posthuman and materialist reconceptualizations. Fundamentally, narrative constructs operate as ordinal discursive machines, channeling matter and time into semiotic forms that cohere to and potentially advance human purposes and consciousness. Yet, within the ontological shift signaled by posthumanist and new materialist thought, the project of decentering humanistic approaches to understanding reality has been established as a central ethical imperative. In this tension, I use this paper to explore a possible reconsideration of narrative within this ontological shift – particularly highlighting the aporia-producing capacity of aesthetic work – as well as to question this desire to “rescue” narrative as simply another manifestation of hegemonic, anthropocentric thought.

Author

• Jake Burdick, Purdue University