Przestrzenie opowieści a podmiotowość narracyjna człowieka

Story Spaces and Human Narrative Subjectivity In the paper “Story Spaces and Human Narrative Subjectivity”, Ignacy Kłaput analyses the possibilities of framing narrative in topological terms, as taking place in several different – abstractly conceived – spaces, and considers the ethical challenges of narrative that are revealed by adopting a topological perspective. The author discusses the two typologies of story space regions proposed in the literature – Ruth Ronen’s typology and Marie-Laure Ryan’s typology. The author draws on the Bakhtinian notion of the chronotope and argues for a distinctly spatio-temporal approach to the story world. He also points out that the typologies discussed can easily be adapted to analyse the space-time, not just the space, of the story world. Further in the paper, he notes that the proposed typologies disregard the specificity of the story world arising from the narrative itself. In order to capture this dimension of the story world, the author proposes to look at the spaces that take shape around the characters of the story and, crucially, at the narrative space that structures the elements of the story according to their relevance to its specific themes. The author also seeks to show how these different types of space interact and condition each other. An analysis of the spaces of the story world reveals the distinct roles played by the narrator, the audience and the protagonist of the story in relation to them. The author proposes to frame human narrative subjectivity through the performance of precisely these three roles. With the concepts of narrative space, character space and narrative subjectivity at his disposal, he identifies the threat of human objectification that arises due to the value judgement encoded in the structure of each narrative space. This threat becomes particularly acute when the narrative serves to directly capture the real world rather than the fictional world. The author does, however, suggest a way to address ethical challenges associated with a narrative understanding of reality. Thus, at the end of the paper, a set of principles is outlined that, if followed when engaging in narrative activity, can minimise the risk of losing narrative subjectivity.