“A life is no more than a biological phenomenon as long as it has not been interpreted.” Life in quest of narrative is an attempt to “reformulate the relation between life and narrative”; to illustrate that the commonsensical trajectory—from life to a story—is not as unidirectional as it may initially appear; that that which appears obvious must be submitted to critical/experiential doubt, since fiction results in biological, real life the same way life results in fiction (“for reading is itself already a way of living in the fictive universe of the work). Recour amalgamates Aristotelian Poetics/Russian Formalism/French Structuralism into a sort of ‘reader’s response theory’, coining the term emplotment to describe the process of integrating (narrating plot) and its finalization (attained “only in the reader or in the spectator”). That is to say, It is the reader’s/spectator’s subjective experience that is given the interpretive primacy over what Ricoeur calls narratology (i.e. linguistics), for the act of reading—the work being read—fuses together “the horizon of expectation and the horizon of experience.” For Ricoeur, “[t]he hermeneutical problem begins, then, where linguistics leaves off.”This reader experience oriented approach to literature “attempts to discover new features of referentiality which are not descriptive, features of communicability which are not utilitarian, and features of reflexivity which are not narcissistic, as these are engendered by the literary work.”
