Mimetic Defiguration: The Retelling of Narratives in a Changing World

Abstract

Narratives are frameworks that allow us to make sense of human experience in a way that is rooted in temporality. Following Paul Ricoeur, narratives are constructed in a threefold process of mimesis: the prefiguration, configuration and refiguration of action. The scale of narratives ranges from small stories to grand cultural histories. In the latter case, the inevitable changing of the world renders the semantic, cultural paradigm on which a people’s narrative is built vulnerable to becoming meaningless, bringing about a defiguration of the narrative. However, the semantics of the old narrative can be transformed to construct a new one. In this article, we will investigate this phenomenon of defiguration and integrate it into Ricoeur’s theory of mimesis.