A hermeneutical reading of The Universe Story towards the configuration of the human in the text

Abstract

This thesis undertakes a hermeneutical reading of The Universe Story through the lens of Paul Ricoeur s narrative hermeneutics, while drawing too on environmental hermeneutics, to determine the configuration of the human in the text. Ricoeur argues that narrative plays a primary role in the manner in which a subject comes to self-understanding. He viewed the hermeneutical task as being to assist human understanding through an investigation of what happened in the text so that a life may be refigured, and his narrative hermeneutics offers a model by which to undertake a critical textual analysis. In this model prefiguration begins the explanation of the narrative and relates to the pre-history of the story told. This incorporates an analysis of the traditions, histories and thinkers who influenced the narrative, both explicitly and implicitly. Configuration refers to the arrangement of events in the narrative and involves an exploration of language, structure and style and how these contribute to the meaning of the narrative. The third, re-figuration , is the self-understanding that can come when the world of the reader fuses in imagination with the world of the text , but that is always guided by the text itself. Since its publication in 1992 The Universe Story has generated a large body of secondary work in literature, music and the arts. Despite this it has been very little analysed and the world that it proposes, in addition to who the human is in this world, remains unexplored. This study focuses specifically on the human of the text. It explores the way in which the narrative is both prefigured and configured, and the meanings associated with the human released by this configuration. The narrative discloses the human as located within a time-developmental universe both utterly dependent on and shaped by Earth and cosmological processes while simultaneously responsible for the inauguration of an ecological era .