Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book shows how metaphor and narrative may be analysed in terms of the objective textual mediatory characteristics of a figurative and semantic dialectic; the figurative being grounded in symbolic structures which mediate activity in terms of its ontological roots, sonority and rhythm being essential features of this activity. It analyses validation as the basis of reasonable hope in terms of Paul Ricoeur’s notion of attestation as the basis of a conviction of probability. That is, attestation analogous to juridical witness and testimony, and evaluated by practical wisdom as specified through the Aristotelian notion of phronesis. The decline of storytelling coincides with the breakdown and fragmentation of temporal unity and ‘meaning of life’ of the grand narratives which set the scene for the storyteller until the beginning of modern times in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.