OTOBİYOGRAFİ VE PAUL RICOEUR: TARİHSEL ANLATIDA ZAMANIN BİÇİMLENDİRİLMESİ
AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND PAUL RICOEUR: CONFIGURATION OF TIME IN HISTORICAL NARRATIVE

Summary/Abstract: Autobiography, as a literary narrative, is located within the intersection zone between history and fiction. Autobiography is close to historiography due to its reference to an actual past, and it is also close to fiction due to its use of narrative strategies while shaping the past in retrospect. This literary genre, which presents a sort of transitivity between history and fiction, structures authentic time experience within the narrative form, and it subjects lived time to the formative principle of narrative. Paul Ricoeur’s voluminous work, titled Time and Narrative, is mainly concerned with the principle that narratives configure individual and collective experience temporally. In this work he scrutinizes the parallelisms between historiography and fiction on the one hand; and examines the differences between these two narrative forms as to the procedures of configuring time within the framework of philosophy and narratology on the other. Ricoeur evaluates narrative structure in terms of plot, mimesis and re-figuration of authentic experience so as to investigate temporality in historical and fictional texts. This study principally claims that Ricoeur’s remarks in his work concerning the temporal functions of narratives in both history and fiction also hold true for autobiographical narratives. Accordingly, autobiography grants individuals the power to interpret past actions and to form their selfhood depending on the principles that human actions take place in time and that narratives have the potential to re-structure time.

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