“Beautifully written and philosophically nuanced, The Ethics of Storytelling is a major contribution to the study of narrative in literature and history. Because of its rigorous but lucidly articulated interdisciplinarity, Meretoja’s book will be of interest to literary theorists, philosophers, psychologists, and scholars of cultural memory, among others. At the core of this important work is the compelling ethical insight that literature can cultivate our sense of history as a sense of the possible. Focused especially on literature in the wake of the Holocaust and National Socialism, its implications are far-reaching.”
Michael Rothberg, Professor of English and Comparative Literature and 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies, University of California-Los Angeles, author of Multidirectional Memory and The Implicated Subject
“Hanna Meretoja has written a much-needed book, showing how literature can expand our sense of the possible while warning against inflated claims about its moral value. Both hope and caution, she insists, are needed. Meretoja’s analysis is remarkably capacious in its synthesis of literary, philosophical, and historical perspectives. Its intellectual ambitions, meanwhile, are matched by the exceptional precision and clarity of its arguments. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the ethics of narrative.”
Rita Felski, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor, Department of English, University of Virginia, author of The Uses of Literature, The Limits of Critique and Hooked
Brian Schiff, Professor and Chair, Department of Psychology, The American University of Paris; author of A New Narrative for Psychology
“Hanna Meretoja’s The Ethics of Storytelling is a textured and authoritative inquiry into the interpretative webs of narrative that entangle human lives and provide the possibilities, and constraints, for the imaginative realization of self, other, and world. Breaking the disciplinary boundaries between literary studies and the human sciences, the book demonstrates the power of muscular interdisciplinary scholarship for the development of narrative theory. Meretoja masterfully argues for potential of literature to transform our understanding of history as an inevitable series of events and reinvigorate the past as a space of ethical choices and possibilities. Meretoja offers fresh insights into the collective re-interpretation of the lingering, cataclysmic, events of the 20th century but also a creative pathway forward in meeting the ethical challenges of our times. Required reading for anyone interested in narrative.”
“All that seems immediately present and as ‘given’ is the result of interpretation. This idea is at the heart of Hanna Meretoja’s book in which she convincingly shows that interpretation is not only central for narrative and fiction but for the entire human condition, our being-in-the-world. Expertly bringing together rich traditions of literary scholarship, narrative theory, and hermeneutic philosophy, she sheds new light on the old riddle of how narratives help us to understand and live our lives.”
Jens Brockmeier, Professor, Department of Psychology, The American University of Paris; author of Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative, and the Autobiographical Process
“Certainly one of the most interesting new literary publications in 2018. In particular, how Meretoja draws on both older theory and research results from cognitively oriented literary studies and brings them into dialogue with each other proves to be profitable. Last but not least, the book is particularly reader-friendly due to its clear structure and the numbering of its individual thoughts.”
Julia Stetter, Diegesis: Interdisciplinary E-Journal for Narrative Research 7(2), 2018: 184-188 (translation)
“Reading Hanna Meretoja’s The Ethics of Storytelling has been a pure pleasure. It is a book carefully researched, rigorously theorised, well designed and beautifully written. It is a philosophical contribution to narrative theory, which nevertheless captures you like a novel and from its very first pages achieves what its subtitle promises: to open up possibilities of understanding, rethinking and re-imagining the force of storytelling through the lens of narrative hermeneutics. Although Meretoja is a literary scholar her take on the concept of narrative hermeneutics, as well as her philosophical exploration of the ethics of storytelling apply to both fictional and non-fictional narratives, following a line of thinkers who explore multifarious connections between literature, auto/biographies and history/ies.”
Maria Tamboukou, Life Writing 17(1), 2020: 129-130
“Meretoja’s book is a nuanced analysis of the complicated ethical valences of narrative. She makes a lucid case for why and how powerful narratives— and all the examples she discusses are powerful in different ways— are ethically effective even though they do not offer some straightforward moral training. […] Meretoja’s conception of the possible, articulated with nuance and compelling examples in this book, can offer important tools in helping all of us navigate disagreement as a quintessential aspect of modernity, rather than seek agreement at the risk of manufacturing it as mere disguise for pushing our own values and beliefs against another’s.”
Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, Storyworlds 10(1-2), 2018: 117-123
“Developing this narrative hermeneutics, Meretoja draws on a wide range of works from narrative ethics, literary narrative studies and ethical criticism, philosophy of narrative, narrative psychology and cultural memory studies. As such, the first chapters of this book provide a thorough overview of current discussions on the ethics of storytelling and their roots in each of these fields, and Meretoja often takes up thought-provoking positions in those discussions. Because of this, these chapters could function as a research guide, especially on the ethics of life writing, offering a series of questions on the interrelatedness of ethics and the narrative form that can be taken up by other scholars. Furthermore, the specific form of narrative hermeneutics that Meretoja develops is a practical and concise method for the analysis of narratives.”
Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar, The European Journal of Life Writing IX, 2020: 25-30
“This book stands out for a number of reasons. First, it is an important and timely demonstration of the relevance of hermeneutics as a truly general theory of interpretation and of narrative, which has transdisciplinary relevance and encompasses an impressive range of facets of narrative: cultural, cognitive, interpretative, dialogical, rhetorical, performative, experiential, and ethical-existential. Second, the book develops an original conception of hermeneutical ethics based on the “sense of the possible” (15 – 16), which has strong societal and existential relevance and is applicable to narrative and storytelling practices of all kinds. Third, while earlier ethical criticism and work on narrative ethics tend to generalize that narratives (and narrative fiction in particular) are ethical, this book offers workable criteria—which themselves are rooted in the author’s conception of ethics—for the analysis of when and why they have ethical potential or could be problematic or dangerous. […] Meretoja’s textual analyses form a clear illustration of the relevance of hermeneutics’ deliberation and reasoning. More generally, with its theoretical coherence and breadth, its argumentative clarity and fairness, and its lucid acknowledgment of the value-laden character of both narratives and many theories of narrative, this book should have high relevance for the many disciplines and professional fields in which the interpretative and ethical dimensions of narrative are, or deserve to be, a central concern.”
Liesbeth Korthals Altes, Poetics Today 41(4), 2020: 739-748
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Hanna Meretoja 