09 May 2015 @ 04:14 pm
 
III people's storytelling is informed by a sense of responsibility to the commonsense world and represents one way of living for the other. People tell stories not just to work out their own changing identities, but also to guide others who will follow them. They seek not to provide a map that can guide others-each must create his own-but rather to witness the experience of reconstructing one's own map. Witnessing is one duty to the commonsensical and to others.
The idea of telling one's story as a responsibility to the commonsense world reflects what I understand as the core morality of the postmodern. Storytelling is for an other just as much as it is for oneself. In the reciprocity that is storytelling, the teller offers herself as guide to the other's self-formation. The other's receipt of that guidance not only recognizes but values the teller. The moral genius of storytelling is that each, teller and listener, enters the space of the story for the other. Telling stories in postmodern times, and perhaps in all times, attempts to change one's own life by affecting the lives of others.

(Arthur W. Frank "The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics")
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