Narrative Phenomenology Sample Clauses

Narrative Phenomenology. The narrative phenomenology amounts to the ‘what it is like to be’ a person in the world. It relies on the body, in that the phenomenological experience of being cannot take place without embodiment. Furthermore, it is pre-reflective, as one does not need to direct one’s attention to it for it to exist. In the words of Merleau-Ponty: I observe external objects with my body, I handle them, examine them, walk around them, but as for my body, I do not observe it itself [in action or in the act of perception]: in order to be able to do so, I should need the use of a second body which itself would be unobservable (Merleau-Ponty, 1945). Its pre-reflective quality avoids the infinite regress described here by Merleau- Ponty. If one always needed a second order body to observe oneself, or take one’s body as an intentional object, an infinite number of higher order bodies would be required for a self to be known. The pre-reflective quality of narrative phenomenology, however, grants first-person privileged knowledge of one’s experience. Indeed, one can take one’s own thoughts and feelings as intentional objects in a second order manner, but this is not what narrative phenomenology is referring to. And finally, one cannot fail to ever have a narrative phenomenology. This first-person experiential aspect of the narrative self differs from both the narrative content and the narrative context in concrete ways. In contrast to the former— which is the who, what, where, why and how, of a person’s story—the narrative phenomenology consists of the experience of the particulars of that character’s plot. Furthermore, the narrative context places constraints on potential narratives based on the broader socio-cultural, economic, political context in which a narrative takes place and makes content and phenomenology possible; whereas the narrative phenomenology is the first person experience that emerges out of that wider perspective. Xxxxxxx Xxxxxxx-Xxxxx, author of the seminal Phenomenology of Perception, developed some of the most prominent principles of the phenomenology of self. He emphasized the role that embodiment played in our being in the world or ipseity. More specifically, our phenomenological experience depends on a pre-reflective proprioceptive awareness of our bodily action (Xxxxxxxxx & Xxxxxx, 2008, p. 159). This embodied, non- conceptual valence of experience serves as the epicenter of our narrative. When one perceives, the body is simultaneously revealed as an u...