Storied Moments: On the Narrative Time of Experience and Interaction

Abstract

This paper explores the narrative configuration of lived time as both subjectively and intersubjectively constituted. More specifically, we investigate temporality as it is expressed in the recent characterization of tradition as meta-discursive practice and pain as a culturally mediated subjective phenomena. We suggest that such temporal qualities as the “timelessness” of tradition and the “timefullness” of chronic pain are best understood in terms of a hermeneutical and phenomenological approach to lived time as articulated through narrative and realized in interaction. That is, the durative quality of both tradition and pain reveals itself as figured less along lines of objectively measurable units of time and more as an existential, semiotic, and interactional formulation of phenomena considered central to the interlocutor’s moment-to-moment emplacement along a narratively framed continuum of past-present-future.

Keywords: Temporality, Narrative, Experience, Interaction, Pain, Tradition