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Acting, Thinking, and Telling: Anna Blume's Dilemma in Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things

  • Matti Hyvärinen

Abstract:

“Because you cannot act, you find yourself unable to think,” says Anna Blume in Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things. This idea is discussed in connection with thinkers who connect action and narrative, such as Arendt, Ricoueur and Fludernik. If narrative indeed is a way to perceive and interpret action, a world reduced to hazard and behavior seems to leave neither space nor frameworks for thinking.  Looking from this perspective, the narrative way of thinking is a prerequisite for other modes of thinking as well. The discussion of the extreme situation of no narrative and no thinking is related to Dominick LaCapra’s work on trauma and narration.

 

Matti Hyvärinen is a Research Director at Tampere University, Finland. He has studied the conceptual history of narrative, the narrative turns and interdisciplinary narrative theory. He is the co-editor of the volumes Narrative Theory, Literature, and New Media: Narrative Minds and Virtual Worlds (Routledge 2015), The Travelling Concepts of Narrative (Benjamins 2013), and Beyond Narrative Coherence (Benjamins 2010). He has published in several journals and edited volumes, including the entry on narrative genres in the Handbook of Narrative Analysis. He serves as the vice-director in the research centre Narrare, at Tampere University.

 

updated August 30, 2018

 

Publisher's Version

Volume 4, issue 2 Narrative as a Way of Thinking
Last updated on 04/17/2020