Hyvärinen

Works

Programmatic essays and edited collections rather than one book.

• “Revisiting the Narrative Turns” (2010) argues there were at least four distinct turns — in literary narratology, in historiography, in the social sciences, and in popular and political discourse — and that treating them as one event is the source of much confusion in the field.
• Beyond Narrative Coherence (2010), co-edited, is the collective statement that narrative research has over-assumed coherence.
• The Travelling Concepts of Narrative (2013), co-edited, follows the term across disciplinary borders and documents what changes in transit.
• His conceptual-history work traces how narrative became a keyword, and treats that expansion as a phenomenon to be studied rather than a background fact.

Central ideas

Four, and the second is what this lens actually borrows.

• There was no single narrative turn. Structuralist narratology, the historiographical turn, the social-scientific turn and the popular sense of narrative are four movements with different objects, and a concept imported from one carries commitments that do not hold in another.
• Coherence is an expectation, not a finding. Requiring a life account to hang together imports a norm into the research and then discovers it, and a fragmentary account may simply not be a narrative rather than being a bad one.
• Narrative is a travelling concept: it changes as it crosses fields, and the changes usually go unacknowledged by the people making them.
• Whether people actually experience their lives narratively is an empirical question. Much narrative research treats it as a premise, which converts the thing to be shown into the thing assumed.

Distinctive vocabulary

Three terms whose looseness is itself part of his subject.

• Narrative turn: in his usage a plural, four distinct movements. The singular is the confusion he documents.
• Coherence: a property researchers expect of accounts, not a property accounts reliably have.
• Travelling concept: a term that moves between disciplines and is altered by the move. Not a metaphor and not interdisciplinarity as a virtue.

Debates and disagreements

The arguments run both ways from his position.

• Galen Strawson's case against narrativity is the sharper version of the same suspicion: some people simply do not experience their lives as stories, and treating narrativity as a psychological and ethical norm is both false and harmful. Hyvärinen's programme is more moderate and shares the anti-assumption stance.
• Whether narrative research survives dropping coherence, or whether the concept then loses the definition that made it usable.
• Whether conceptual history is a critique or a way of deferring the theoretical commitments it examines.

Intellectual relationships

He works on the field rather than only in it.

• Bruner's account of life as narrative is a principal target — not refuted so much as historicised, shown to be a position with a date rather than a discovery.
• Hayden White supplies the historiographical turn that his plural account separates out.
• Ricoeur's narrative identity, a reference in this work's hermeneutic lineage, is the philosophical version of the coherence assumption he questions.
• Arthur Frank, in this same lens lineage, supplies the point of contact: the chaos narrative is a type defined by resisting narration.
• Koselleck's conceptual history, a reference in this work's historical-temporal lineage, is the methodological source for treating narrative as a keyword with a history.
• Strawson supplies the strongest objection to narrativity as a general condition.

How it changes this reading

Hyvärinen is named in the lineage of the Narrative-literary lens, and his role there is to keep the lens from assuming its own object.

• The lens reads accounts as shaped tellings. He supplies the prior question: whether a set of material is organised narratively at all, rather than reading it as though it must be.
• The coherence critique is the load-bearing borrowing for this work. A fluent reading that finds a through-line across scattered material is PRODUCING coherence as much as finding it, and the fluency of the result is not evidence for it — which is precisely the failure mode this work's treatment of cumulative profiles is built to catch.
• There is a reflexive point that belongs in the entry: the lens is itself one of the travelling concepts he studies, so applying it carries assumptions he asks readers to make explicit rather than inherit.
• It is not evidence about anyone's storytelling, coherence, or self-understanding.

Useful comparisons

The lens names three figures working on three different objects.

• Arthur Frank works on illness narratives and their types — restitution, chaos, quest — and on what telling does for a teller.
• Wayne Booth works on crafted fiction: rhetoric, the implied author, unreliable narration, and the ethics of reading.
• Matti Hyvärinen works on the concept of narrative itself and on what narrative research assumes before it starts.

Where the ideas meet

All three refuse the transparency of a telling.

• None treats an account as a clear window onto the events it reports.
• All three attend to how a telling is shaped and by what.
• Each treats the form of an account as consequential rather than as packaging.

Where they part

The transfer between these three is exactly what he warns about.

• Booth's apparatus assumes a crafted work with an implied author to reconstruct. Ordinary accounts have neither, and importing implied author or unreliable narrator into them is one of the unacknowledged transfers his work documents.
• Frank's typology sorts narratives into kinds; Hyvärinen asks first whether the material is narrative at all. The point of contact is chaos, which is Frank's name for the type that will not hold together — the place where the typology meets the coherence critique.
• A reading using all three should say whether it is analysing a crafted telling, typing a told experience, or questioning whether either frame applies.

Limits

• A conceptual history establishes nothing about any person's storytelling or self-understanding.
• The coherence critique is a caution about method; it is not evidence that any particular account is or is not coherent.

Criticisms

The objections are about what the programme builds.

• Dropping coherence risks leaving narrative without a definition, and critics hold the programme better at demolition than at construction.
• Conceptual history documents how a term has been used and can defer the theoretical questions it raises rather than answering them.
• The position lives in essays and edited collections rather than one sustained statement, which makes it harder to cite precisely and easier to cite loosely.

Common misreadings

Four uses this placement does not license.

• Treating the narrative turn as one event, which is the specific conflation his work documents.
• Assuming that people experience their lives narratively, which is the premise the programme suspends.
• Reading incoherence in an account as a deficiency in the person giving it.
• Importing literary narratology's apparatus into ordinary accounts without noticing that a transfer has occurred.

What remains outside this idea

• It cannot establish anything about any person's account, coherence, or self-understanding.
• It cannot convert a critique of method into a finding about a life.