The Australian Library Journal
volume 50 issue 2

Narrative identity as a central theme in an ethics of librarianship

The theory of narrative identity presented by Paul Ricoeur is suggested as a basis for understanding the notion of person. The action of reading is considered as an analogy to understand not only how we make an account of an individual or corporate life, but also how we as persons live inside an identity as an ongoing consciousness. Some implications for an ethics of librarianship are explored.

Manuscript received December 1999

This is a refereed article

In a previous article (Jones 1998) I argued that the narrative about customers, which emanates from business, is too thin to sustain a profession such as librarianship, and that narratives about reading could be re-authored because they are rich in unexplored possibilities. In this article I propose to extend these ideas to an exploration of how an ethics of librarianship could rest on development of a theory of narrative identity. For example there has been an assertion that a good author is one who makes us into better readers, but an even better author is one who makes us into authors ourselves (Bruner J 1986, Ricoeur 1988). Such an idea could be central to how we think of person and what we think constitutes a good life. To many readers my explorations will seem at their best a puzzling way to go and at their worst a useless one, but I am encouraged in this endeavour on a range of fronts, not the least of which is on the one hand the emerging interest in the notion of meaning and in theories of reading in areas such as artificial intelligence research, and on the other the increasingly urgent calls for new ways to identify what constitutes good information.

Simply stated, narrative identity has been defined as an achievement, one which pertains to those questions in narratives which involve 'who?' (Ricoeur 1992). Such questions include 'who acted?', 'who intervened?', 'what was done to whom', 'on whose behalf was the action taken?' and 'who is to blame?' (Ricoeur 1995). In other words, narrative identity is an accounting of a certain kind; we make an account of ourselves in response to the question 'who am I?'. If this is applied to librarianship then we bring into view such questions as 'who are the members of the library?' or 'who am I as a librarian?' These questions relate to narratives composed in the practice of librarianship, which is both a field of forces and a field of struggle (Bourdieu 1998; Wacquant 1998), by which I mean that people take action as part of extended practices which have a tradition (Carr 1986; MacIntyre 1981) and this has its counterpart in persons who experience the actions of others. [1]

Interest in narrative identity has been emerging in various fields (Kerby 1991, White 1997, Van den Hengel 1994, Hermans 1995), but it is in philosophy that we find both the extended history of this interest as well as the most advanced thinkers who are making a contribution to the current debate. Paul Ricoeur (1998), whose narrative theory I have briefly described (Jones 1998), tells us that the greatest achievement of his seminal work Time and narrative is the beginning of his project to develop a theory of narrative identity, and it is through a theory of reading that he approaches this task. But before going ahead it is important to emphasise that in using that word theory it is not my intention to put off those readers who seek to make a distinction between theory and practice. The beauty of Ricoeur's contribution is that he clearly tracks the relationship between the action of making a narrative and the actions that a particular narrative leads to. So for example the neoliberalism narrative (Bourdieu 1998a), which we know in Australia as 'economic rationalism' (Pusey 1991), can be analysed as an unfolding action but it can also be considered in terms of the actions that people have taken as a result of it, both in their own lives and in the lives of others. On this basis I invite my readers to be open to narrative theory as a fruitful source of new narratives about how to proceed, and as a source of hope that stories which have been imposed on Australians are always, in a sense, open to reauthoring.

Narrating an identity
Ricoeur contends that without a concept of what we mean by person we have no way to proceed in any practical sense, and that any notion of human reality is dependent on this. He therefore speaks of the designation of persons at the level of language (Ricoeur 1989), but it is his work on self that is of most interest to us here. He accounts for his own position by situating himself in reference to the major debate about what constitutes a self. We can therefore see in his writing a response to an inherited conversation, one which he describes as the Cartesian/Nietzschean conflict of interpretations over what constitutes 'self', and furthermore we can see how he tries to find a way to continue this conversation about self into new directions. He tells us that a key problem is how we account for those narrative questions which relate to 'who?' and he suggests for a person that there are a series of dialectics at work in the process of narrating an identity. First, there is a dialectic of explanation and understanding, whereby a process of interpretation involves a threefold movement of interpretation, understanding and explanation. In other words, a person interprets a symbol, understands it and then explains its meaning; he argues that this happens regardless of whether we assign priority to one or other of two kinds of events - interpretations or facts - because both are present and part of one set of operations. Secondly Ricoeur attends to the importance of the dialectic between self and other, which he suggests is multiple in the sense that it is characterised by experience of one's own body, the self of reciprocity or dialogue with other people, and the dialogue with what can be thought of as the other within. He argues that the last is experienced as conscience. Thirdly there is the dialectic of identity, which is shaped by narrative in time. Each of these contribute to what he says is a dynamic relationship between sameness and selfhood, by which he means that we can be identified in time as the same person, but we also change over time as we develop selfhood.

The link to narrative theory exists as those all important 'who?' questions and perhaps the most important of these is 'who am I?', a question which we all answer to in terms of these dialectics. The instant this question is raised, the interaction inherent in the dialogue brings the notion of power to the fore and into our attention. Previously I suggested that Bourdieu's ideas can be used to explore power and this is still useful in the sense that he helps us to see how a person or group takes a position in a field and in turn is positioned by the field. The notion of power is perhaps more difficult to discern in Ricoeur's work, perhaps because it is in his theory of reading that we find it most fully developed. As far as I can determine there has been no attempt to date to adapt this to the practice of management or the study of organisations.

Ricoeur reminds us that the process of narrative making, which consists of three linked operations of pre-figuration, configuration and re-figuration (Ricoeur 1984), has its counterpart in a theory of reading. For Ricoeur such a theory should incorporate the author's strategy towards the reader, the inscription of this strategy in a text, and the response by the reader as a reading subject and as a reading public. Ricoeur argues that the action of reading becomes a metaphor for all action which occurs at the relationship of worlds, including, notably, the action of responding to 'who am I?' If we think of the world of the author, the world of the text and the world of the reader as an analogy we can understand that the operations which join them are those of composition (or configuration) and of reading. The relationship is a productive spiral when understood at its most simple level: for example, authors read and write and the texts achieved are read and written about. But it is important to emphasise that the world of the text as it is used by Ricoeur is also, like the notion of reading, broadly inclusive, in the sense that any achievement of the narrative process can be described in terms of text, and particularly those texts which are in narrative form. He argues that a text is what we interpret and that it has an existence akin to writing in the sense that writing has fixation, albeit some writing is temporary in nature. So for example we achieve as part of narrative operations not only books, articles, internet sites, but also monuments, organisations, fields of practice, traditions and even actions themselves. In this sense what is authored has a semi-autonomous existence as an entity in its own right. When such a semi-autonomous text is thought of as an achievement, we can begin to appreciate that our current preference for a mechanistic view of the world (Gare 1996) can be problematic in that there is a danger in reducing texts to being things, and while we can speak of knowledge management, there is a concomitant danger when doing so that we lose sight of the processes which constantly re-contextualise our achievements because new interpretations are made and new worlds are created. In other words the dynamics of this process of narration come to the fore and into our attention, and the forces which influence such creativity are more open for our understanding.

Strategies of authors, readers and texts
It is appropriate now to develop this notion of strategy by beginning with the idea that a reader undertakes a reply to an author who has set out with a strategy of persuading that reader. First it is possible to argue, as Ricoeur does, that an author inevitably takes a position in a chain of readings or tradition of readings. MacIntyre (1981) reminds us that a living tradition is an ongoing argument, one which is sustained by the past but also points to future possibilities. He further contends that one can only take a position in such an argument by telling a narrative. This is similar to what Ricoeur calls a 'conflict of interpretations', in the sense that such a conflict is ongoing and alive, and it shapes any new interpretations. Bourdieu's concept of a field as a social space is also consistent in the sense that for Bourdieu a field is where 'the basis of identity and hierarchy are endlessly disputed' (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1998, p222). Both authors and readers belong, or have membership in, such traditions and fields. A field can be considered as having a tradition and tradition can be seen as being played out in the argument about the identity of the field. Ricoeur notes:

But tradition ... even understood as the transmission of a depositum, remains a dead tradition if it is not the conflictual interpretation of this deposit: our 'heritage' is not a sealed package we pass from hand to hand, without ever opening, but rather a treasure from which we draw by the handful, and which by this very act is replenished. Every tradition lives by grace of interpretation, and it is at this price that it continues, that is, remains living. (Ricoeur 1974, p27).

In Time and narrative Ricoeur (1985) speaks of the notions of 'point of view' and 'narrative voice' which are linked to the strategies or games that authors put into play. An author takes the form of a 'narrative voice' with the purpose of offering the virtual reader or addressee a work (or text or world), and implied in this action are certain strategies whereby the author sets out to influence the reader. Such strategies can be considered as rhetorical strategies, and Ricoeur identifies a number of them. First there is the effacement of the author exemplified by the voice as in 'first person', 'third person' and so on. Next is a related aspect of positioning, which Ricoeur describes as the author's right to configure the world as if that author is inside the minds of others, for example her characters. Thirdly Ricoeur refers to the angle of vision chosen by the author, which we could interpret as the vantage point chosen in terms of what the author chooses to attend to; this is linked to the rights which the author can expect the reader to confer on her. Fourthly Ricoeur argues that there is authorial strategy at work in the decision to 'show' rather than to 'inform and instruct'; the artifice of simulation is very much a feature of narrative operations. An attempt to author a narrative that is faithful to life is no less artful in this sense than is the attempt at other artful persuasions (Valdes 1991).

By all of these strategies the author persuades the reader to apprehend the work as a unified whole. The reader in turn apprehends the work as a work 'by somebody' and hence the choices that the author has made and the context of those decisions are part of the action of reading.

Ricoeur also includes here the related notion of reliable versus unreliable narrator. He argues that there is a pact of reading present in the relationship between reader and author. Trust then acts as a counterbalance to the violence that can be concealed in the strategy of persuasion. The author asks of the reader the right which encompasses that of judgement, for example an author presents a character in the novel in a certain light, with characteristics not only chosen by the author but also evaluated by the author who is in the powerful position of sitting in judgement (Valdes 1991).

Ricoeur argues that there are certainly texts in which the author sets out to influence the reader such that the reading choices available are already encoded within the text, but on the other hand there are also texts wherein the reader's responsibility for her choices becomes overwhelming. This is captured by what he calls the paradox of reading. On the one hand are readers who are seduced or driven into limited reading choices, and on the other, readers who confront in the text the indeterminate structures which provoke endless interpretations and thus disturbing indeterminacy. Thinking about the flood of apocalyptic stories in our daily diet of news could be one example of this. Ricoeur argues that it is the consideration of this paradox which pushes a theory of reading into phenomenology, as an understanding of the reader's experience is not exhausted by an analysis of the coherence of the author's strategy as it is realised in the text. If we are speaking purely of rhetoric Ricoeur argues that the reader is the prey or victim of the authorial strategy (or possibly of an implied author) and this is an effect of the extent to which this strategy is concealed. Whether reading is a trusting journey in the company of a reliable narrator or whether it is a struggle with an implied author, the journey inevitably leads back to the reader herself; hence a theory of the reader's response is required if we are to understand the stratagems of the author.

Readers participate in what Ricoeur calls the sedimented expectations of the general reading public and it is in relationship that they are constituted as competent readers. For Ricoeur it is at this level that the first reply to the rhetoric of persuasion is encountered, but before turning to the argument he makes for a phenomenology of reading, it is appropriate to consider the inscribed nature of strategies, as these are characteristic of the text. We saw above how texts have a semi-autonomous existence; the author is not present at the reading. So it is important to understand how the structure of the text contributes to the reading experience and how a distance is present, not only between the author and the reader, but also between the text and the reader.

Inevitably a text is schematic, which is taken to mean that it leaves or has places of indeterminate meaning; in this sense no text is ever complete in terms of what it presents to the reader. An invitation is extended to the reader to make concrete what is otherwise schematic and it is only through imagination that the reader can achieve this. The text also exists as parts which remain to be made into a whole, it has a part-whole relation internal to it and the world it proposes is 'defined as the intentional correlate of a sequence of sentences' which remains 'to be made into a whole for such a world to be intended' (Valdes 1991, p400). So for example if the parts are sentences then there is a sequence of temporality in which each sentence points beyond itself by opening a perspective. The reader travels within the text and the play of anticipation and participation 'functions in the text only if it is taken in hand by readers who welcome it into the play of their own expectations' (Valdes 1991, p400). The text becomes a temporally deployed and unfolding action (Carr 1986) which is experienced also as a temporal whole. We can therefore speak of the temporal coherence of a text in the same way that we formerly spoke about the coherence of the author's strategies. In other words a text can, as a discourse event, be characterised as a temporal event. It is at the level of text that we can speak of the projection of a world, a world in which the reader can imagine that it would be possible to dwell.

Ricoeur argues that a text is a work to the extent that it is experienced by the reader as a whole. This is important because when we travel inside the work as our reading progresses, our expectations of the reading project are modified over the duration of the action of reading. A work is therefore the product or achievement of the interaction of the text and the reader. This extends the analogy of world which we previously understood in the context of the world of the text and the world of the reader. The proposed world, the world in front of the text is what the interactive work of reading points to as an achievement which the reader makes. The text, when used as a paradigm, gives Ricoeur a way to think about how transformation of worlds occurs. Whether such worlds are personal, organisational or social, there is a continual interplay between what has been achieved and what could be achieved.

We have seen that it is in the action of reading that the relationship of the reader and text develops, and now we come to the reader's response to the rhetoric of persuasion of the author and what is configured in the text. Ricoeur argues that an individual reader or a reading public can be considered within a theory of the reader's response. The illusion that reading is extrinsic to the text is endlessly reborn according to Ricoeur, but he is convinced that 'Without the reader who accompanies it, there is no configuring act at work in the text; and without a reader to appropriate it, there is no world unfolded before the text.'(Valdes 1991, p395).

There are some features of the relationship between a reader and a text which Ricoeur argues, taken together, make reading a 'truly vital experience'. First he gives the example of modern novels in which there can be a frustrating of the configuration act of the reader, for example the reader of the novel Ulysses by James Joyce expects to find a configuration, but the plot in this particular text is barely sketched out and the task of the reader to interpret is exercised to a great degree. Ricoeur argues that reading such a text becomes a drama of discordant concordance. Gone are the reliable narrator and the safety of a familiar and accompanied journey. The spaces or places of indeterminate meaning in the text are part of the author's strategy as we saw above, but they are also part of the effort the reader exerts to make concordant narrative out of a discordant experience. In giving form, or more form, to what otherwise lacks definite form or structure, the reader responds to the invitation to engage in the process of composition or emplotment. The second dialectical feature, according to Ricoeur, is the presence in the text of an excess of meaning; the text 'appears, by turns, both lacking and excessive in relation to reading.' (Ricoeur 1988, p164). For example many texts can be read on a number of different levels. We see this in cartoons and fairy tales, and in the arguments between trade unions and management. Thirdly Ricoeur suggests that in the search for coherence readers can be too successful, and the unfamiliar becomes familiar. If this happens readers feel themselves to be on an equal footing with the work, and come to believe in it so completely that they lose themselves in it entirely. It is here that we find ways to understand the enormity of some organisation and field changes in the lives of individuals. When the organisation is thought of as a becoming-text then the task of the reader is complex and there may be no sense that there is a reliable narrator present or that the text is familiar and well-known. For those who work in an organisation this presents issues that are to do with reading.

We can say from the above that reading a text involves a pause in an unreal world, a pause wherein reflection occurs. In this reflection Ricoeur argues that a reader subordinates her expectations to those developed by the text and the extent to which this happens shapes the extent to which that reader becomes unreal to herself. The more that a reader becomes unreal in her reading, the more profound and far-reaching will be the work's influence on the world of the reader. 'Our analysis of the act of reading leads us to say ... that the practice of narrative lies in a thought experiment by means of which we try to inhabit worlds foreign to us.' (Ricoeur 1988, p179). The movement is one which takes the reader out of a familiar world and into the world of the text, thus opening to a world of possible meanings, new modes of being in the world and being-interpreted (Kearney 1994).

Ricoeur argues that in terms of these dialectics the 'right' distance from a work is the one from which the illusion is, by turns, irresistible and untenable, but he also argues that a balance between these two impulses is never achieved (Ricoeur 1988), hence we enter into a precarious relationship and the question of creative freedom in this relationship is not a simple one (Valdes 1991). The balance sought is unstable because of the dynamism centred on whether the structure of the text or configuration is equal to the refiguration achieved by the reader. The meaning achieved as a result of reading rests on the dialogic relationship established between the work and its public, so the effect produced is included in the boundaries of the work itself. We can understand that the text is closed, in the sense that it has narrative structure, but that this can only ever be a temporary stabilisation of meaning because a reader can refigure the configuration of the text into new meaning. In terms of power it is appropriate to say that a work has the power to prefigure an experience that the reader is yet to have, but counterbalanced to this is the experience that the reader already has to bring to reading.

Ricoeur thus argues that 'every work is not only an answer provided to an earlier question but a source of new questions' (Ricoeur 1988, p170). The pleasure of the text offered to the reader is the power to open a space in meaning, a space in which the logic of question and answer unfold.

Being enabled to act and being constrained from action - life at the cusp
We have seen above that the dialectic between freedom and constraint is present in the balance achieved by the reader in the action of reading. This is highlighted by the nature of fictional works, whether they be in novel, stage or image form. Such works, according to Ricoeur, empower what he calls the common temporal experience because they lighten the burden which could otherwise be present for the reader in the form of known or real people who live now or in the past. Through reading, a person can be liberated and may realise possibilities that are otherwise blocked or aborted.

The precarious balance which is achieved in the action of reading is paradoxical, for Ricoeur tells us that the confrontation between the world of the text and the world of the reader is a struggle and 'the fusion of horizons of the expectation of the text with those of the reader brings only a precarious peace.' (Ricoeur 1988, p 178). This is what he characterises as the cusp; we live on the cusp of worlds both as readers and as authors. Cast in terms of the project of narrative identity we can appreciate that our life is a becoming-text and these forces at work at the cusp are the forces at work in the answering of the 'who?' questions. We can at the level of a personal life have authorship, or we can be a character in someone else's story or in a larger narrative such as economic rationalism, or we can take on the perspective of narrator, which is what happens when we sit at the bar and tell our life history to a new acquaintance. Ricoeur argues that the ambiguity about how we are positioned creates openings in individual lives. For example we may be caught up in the larger narrative of economic rationalism and the influence of this on the questions about 'whom?' but at the same time we may have authorship powers in other narrative-making settings, perhaps at home or in places of play or recreation. Ricoeur argues that we cannot simply be the author because we are already caught up in the stories of other lives, and it is this that creates an inexplicable aspect to our lives. Hence the account we make to another includes our ups and our downs, our fortunes and misfortunes.

In order to be able to make an account of a life we must effect the power of closure. We tell a story with a beginning, middle and end. It is the notion of re-authorship which then stands at the boundary between the closure achieved momentarily in an unfinished project such as a lived life. Such an unfinished project could be a life of a person, a life of an organisation or a life of a field with certain traditions. Text in this sense captures that notion of reopening. The closure achieved is temporary. Ricoeur tells us:

The moment when literature attains its highest degree of efficacity is perhaps the moment when it places its readers in the position of finding a solution for which they themselves must find the appropriate questions, those that constitute the aesthetic and moral problem posed by a work. (1988, p173)

In other words, good authors make readers into better readers, but the pinnacle of authorship is to make us into better authors of our own worlds and those of the traditions, fields and communities of readers to whom we belong (Bruner J 1986).

This detour through the world of the text is productive. It testifies to the positive and productive function of the experience of the distance between our world, where we are comfortable and perhaps in the company of a trusted narrator, and the world of the text which can feel very foreign. It is this movement which Ricoeur argues is at the centre of human experience and our sense of human reality. For those of us who work in organisations and/or in fields it is meaningful to characterise the organisation as a becoming-text to which our own becoming is dynamically linked. We then start to get a sense of the relationship between librarianship as part of a personal narrative identity, as part of an organisation identity, and as part of a field. The rhetoric of reading then comes to the fore 'inasmuch as even the reader is in a way constructed in and through the work' (Valdes 1991, p396). So he is arguing that we are changed by the action of reading, and by extension, by the changes in fields and organisations, and that these transformations lend themselves to analysis through understanding the forces at work in the field (Bourdieu 1998), and through seeking to understand, via reading the signs, the narratives and the authorial strategies which are brought to bear. Our lives are in effect ongoing stories in which we are capable of being both hero and character, but we are also part of larger narratives and forces of authorship that are at work in social spaces such as fields.

As we have seen, reading is a productive process, one which is both complex and creative. Ricoeur has shown, using the analogy of the author, the text, and the reader, that the dynamics or forces at work in action and in extended practices with traditions of argument can be described using a theory of reading.

Applications to ethics
We have seen above how a theory of reading underpins the theory of narrative identity offered to us by Ricoeur. Both individual persons and communities of readers make a narrative account to the 'who?' questions, and the strategies of authors, texts and readers help us to explore the powerful forces at work in the making of such an account, forces that may or may not persuade a reader of the authenticity of this account. So what applications can this have to an ethics of librarianship? There are many answers to this question and it is only possible to touch on some ideas here.

The authorial strategies used to position a narrative such as that of economic rationalism could be explored as I have intimated above. Bruner has considered how some narratives rise to dominance and then become transformed, he argues:

In the 1930s and 1940s the dominant story constructed about Native American culture change saw the present as disorganization, the past as glorious, and the future as assimilation. Now, however, we have a new narrative: the present is viewed as a resistance movement, the past as exploitation, and the future as ethnic resurgence. (1986, p139).

He notes that one story simply became discredited and the new narrative took over. Similarly we could ask how this could be applied to the rise of economic rationalism, a narrative which it could be argued advantages one particular form of capital over others, for example economic over cultural capital (Wacquant 1998).

Ricoeur argues with respect to fiction that:

...the rhetoric of fiction brings on stage an implied author, who, through the ploy of seduction, attempts to make the reader identical with himself. But, when readers, discovering the place prescribed for them in the text, no longer feel seduced but terrorized, their only recourse is to set themselves at a distance from the text and to become fully conscious of the distance between the expectations developed by the text and their own expectations, as individuals caught up in everyday concerns and as members of a cultured public formed by an entire tradition of readings. (1988, p178).

Alfino & Pierce argue:

A self-legislating or autonomous person is less susceptible to the control of others, feels bound by obligations which are experienced as his or her own, and is able to evaluate recommendations of others and self-consciously appropriate new rules of conduct and plans of action. Autonomy is both an instance of self-realization and a condition for other sorts of self-realization. It is a challenge to become autonomous, and while we rightly feel some pride at 'being our own person', that satisfaction depends upon achieving some degree of autonomy. (1997, p55).

As we have seen above the notion of becoming-text captures the dynamics of this process. The challenge of living at the cusp is the challenge of making a coherent account to the question 'who am I?' an account which perhaps enables us to act on the basis of larger narratives which themselves are emergent (Gare 1996).

With regard to the emergence of economic rationalism, which perhaps should more properly be named 'neo-liberalism', we could consider the extent to which a growing number of Australians feel threatened by the text and puzzled by the identity of its authors and their purposes. Can the struggles we are now seeing be explained using Ricoeur's theory of narrative identity? I argue that we could consider such restorying in the light of the contention that good authors make us into better authors ourselves, and suggest what future narrative paths are available in terms of helping Australians to author a better identity, a world in which it will be possible to live. And who will help them to get there? Ricoeur contends that the self of self-knowledge is the fruit of an examined life and that this represents the detours taken through the works of a culture, works that have been applied to it, but that this also applies to the self-constancy of a community, which is constituted in the narratives that become actual history (Ricoeur 1988). An ethics of librarianship could account for the part librarians play in this endeavour.

I suggest that the theory of narrative identity could be a central theme in further development of what constitutes an ethics of librarianship and that such a theory helps us to understand what we intend when we use the notion of person. Such a theory, which is both current and yet rooted firmly in tradition, could enable a better understanding of what is intended when we speak of a successful life or what constitutes a good life.

References

Alfino M & Pierce L (1997) Information ethics for librarians. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Bourdieu P (1998a) 'The essence of neoliberalism' in P Bourdieu Acts of resistance: against the tyranny of the market. New York: The New Press. (Also available at http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/en/1998/12/?c=08bourdieu).

Bourdieu P (1998) Practical reason. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Bourdieu P & Wacquant L J D (1992) An invitation to reflexive sociology. London: University of Chicago.

Bruner E M (1986) 'Ethnography as narrative' in V W Turner & E M Bruner (Editors), The anthropology of experience. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois.

Bruner J (1986) Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Carr D (1986) Time, narrative, and history. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Gare A (1996). Nihilism Inc.: environmental destruction and the metaphysics of sustainability. Como, NSW: Eco-logical.

Hermans J M & Hermans-Jansen E (1995). Self-narratives: the construction of meaning in psychotherapy. New York: Guilford Press.

Jones B M (1998) 'Customers are consumers of library resources and services: or are they?'. Australian Library Journal, 47(2), 131-144.

Kearney R (1994) Modern movements in European philosophy (2nd ed.). Manchester: Manchester University.

Kerby A P (1991) Narrative and the self. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

MacIntyre A (1981) After virtue: a study in moral theory. London: Duckworth.

Pusey M (1991) Economic rationalism in Canberra: a nation-building state changes its mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University.

Ricoeur P (1998) Critique and conviction: conversations with François Azouvi and Marc Launay. New York: Columbia University.

Ricoeur P (1989) 'The human being as the subject matter of philosophy' in T P Kemp, & D Rasmussen (Ed), The narrative path: the later works of Paul Ricoeur. Cambridge, MA: MIT.

Ricoeur P (1992) Oneself as another. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago.

Ricoeur P (1995) 'Pastoral praxeology, hermeneutics and identity' in P Ricoeur Figuring the sacred: religion, narrative and imagination. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress.

Ricoeur P (1974) 'Structure and hermeneutics' in P Ricoeur The conflict of interpretations: essays in hermeneutics. Evanston: Northwestern University.

Ricoeur P (1984) Time and narrative (Vol 1). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago.

Ricoeur P (1985) Time and narrative (Vol 2). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago.

Ricoeur P (1988) Time and narrative (Vol 3). Chicago: University of Chicago.

Valdes M J (1991) A Ricoeur reader: reflection and imagination. Toronto: University of Toronto.

Van den Hengel J (1994) 'Paul Ricoeur's 'Oneself as another' and practical theology'. Theological Studies, 55(3), 458-481. Retrieved from InfoTrac Expanded Academic ASAP International Edition 25/10/98.

Wacquant L (1998) 'Pierre Bourdieu' in R Stones (Ed) Key sociological thinkers. London: Macmillan.

White M (1997) Narratives of therapists' lives. Adelaide, SA: Dulwich Centre Publications.

1. This can be understood as suffering, which in a philosophical sense has a broader and more inclusive meaning than that which we usually associate with suffering in ordinary language.