A Research In Paul Ricoeur’s Narrative Theory

Paul Ricoeur is the most outstanding spokesperman in France in20th century. As the onlycontemporary philosopher, the phenomenon of Jurists and the interpretation of scientists, who can becompared with Gadamer, his object of study is involve to Philosophy, Sociology, Moral Philosophy,Politics, Religious Studies, Culturology, Hermeneutics and the other major problems of methodology ofgeneral science.“Hermeneutics and The Human Science”,“The Conflict of Interpretations”,“From Textto Action”,“History and Truth”,“Memory, History, Forgetting”,“The Rule of Metaphor”,“TheSymbolism of Evil” and “Time and Narrative” are Ricoeur’s major works. My thesis is focus on hisnarrative theory which is from his masterpiece “Time and Narrative”.“Time and Narrative” centralized to represent Ricoeur’s unusual academic courage and his superboldness in theory. He navigated among literature, history and philosophy with a way of subtle andintangible. It’s grand scale and complicated structure without saying. Ricoeur makes Aristotle andAugustin’s confrontation, the difficult problem of time between Husserl and Kant, and the reflect ofHeidegger’s Being and Time into his own field. By demonstrating imitation’s intermediary function fromarrangement of plots is to build the medium between time and narrative. On the basis of building mediumbetween time and narrative, Ricoeur put forward his own special viewpoint of narrative time theory, and tryto solve the eternal mystery of time.The article is divided into three chapters and four parts. The first part is a preface which aims tointroduce Ricoeur’s major works, present research condition and my innovation. The second part is the firstchapter, which is referred to narrative, time history narrative, Fiction narrative and so on. Our study is bytwo sections to give the whole books’ outline, and at the same time, giving a foreshadowing for narrativetime from logic. In the third part, Ricoeur has wanted to absorb and reform Aristotle’s poetics, and broughtup Pre-figuratiion, Figuration and Re-figuration. What is more, he discovered the healthy circulationbetween time and narrative. In the last part, Ricoeur discussed the two kinds of narrative, namely, historynarrative and Fiction narrative. By the relationship among history, objectivity, narrative discourse, fictionand reality and the intertextuality of the two models. In addition, Ricoeur stood in the phenomenon,hermeneutics and existentialism’s height of philosophy, surrounding history narrative and Fiction narrative to develop a wide discussion. This research has established Ricoeur’s status in the field of narrative.