We cannot, in our dreams, our daydreams, our ambitious fantasies, avoid the imaginative imposition of form on life
The Romance Masterplot
Our very definition as human beings is very much bound up with the stories we tell about our own lives and the world in which we live. Life is in many respects narrativized in series and bunches of intersecting stories – never complete until our death, of course, but nonetheless oriented toward the significant chapterization of our existence.
In medieval romance, for instance, romantic love was often seen as lds singles a destructive force and was regularly positioned as adulterous: think, for instance, of the deleterious effect that the love of Lancelot and Guinevere has in medieval Arthurian romances
To put this another way: storytelling is fundamental to the human experience. In particular, it is fundamental to how humans experience time. Paul Ricoeur (1990, p. 3), in his seminal work on time and narrative, argues that, ‘[t]ime becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative; narrative, in turn is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal existence’. H Porter Abbott (2008, p. 3) uses the phrase ‘narrative time’ rather than Ricoeur’s ‘human time’, and juxtaposes it with ‘clock time’.
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