An existentialist approach to the narrativisation of temporal predicaments in dilemma stories and vignettes

Abstract

The institution of diversity in discourses by the postmodern condition and the infinity of interpretations that this entails, have challenged and in fact decentralized the notion of totality in dominant Western discourses. These have inevitably questioned the dominance of hegemonic narratives and thus renewed the call for fresh perspectives on the study of narratives. This study believes that a philosophical and a rhetorically based study of dilemma stories and vignettes (DSV) can adequately establish them as belonging to a narrative genre that is still alive worldwide rather than folklore relics in Africa and Asia. The study therefore attempts a generalised schema of DSV based on the premise that they are examples of intentional narratives that impose a cosmology of temporal possibilities in a rhetorical revelation of the world as a site for freedom. In this context, this study provides an existentialist hermeneutic of dilemma stories and vignettes within their fictive intelligence in order to analyze the themes and narrative techniques used by the stories to capture dilemma situations and possibilities in existential temporality. In doing so the study takes into account the contemporaneity of the genre and the growing global interest in the narrative as a means of understanding the human condition in general and in its specific or historical context.

Keywords: Reflective theorisation, existentialist hermeneutics, existential temporality, dominant discourses, subversive narrative techniques, matrix narratives, narrative parallelism.