Philosopher of Stories: A Novel

A philosophy professor named Herbert Blauer seeks to pioneer a new field of study he dubs "story philosophy," in part to make sense of his own life story, with all its twists and turns. He morphs from a struggling student into a former faculty member who, having been rejected for tenure, tries to retransform himself yet again--but into what? Blauer imagines a reciprocation of romantic love, writes a personal ethic about the difficulty of knowing what to value, undertakes graduate study after an apprenticeship in factory labor, reads widely (and wildly) in diverse fields of inquiry, ghost-writes the memoir of an extraterrestrial television character, and questions the prestige hierarchies that, more or less overtly, govern academic life. He also creates a fictional alter ego in an effort to understand what stories are and how they work--the nature of narrative being his main scholarly concern as well. The self-reflexivity of the novel, the way it narrates Blauer's possibly unhealthy obsession with narratives, dramatizes one of its key themes: namely, how stories, and processes of storytelling, go all the way down. To break free from the disempowering narratives in which we sometimes cast ourselves, or have been cast by others, all we can do is tell further stories, create alternative accounts in which we feature differently. Yet as Blauer discovers over the course of the novel, some ways of telling counter-narratives are more productive, more empowering, than others. In dialogue with writers and texts ranging from Aristotle to Alfred North Whitehead, from Ovid to Ursula K. Le Guin, from The Divine Comedy to The Incredible Shrinking Man, he comes to recognize the need for new storytelling practices. Or rather, he seeks to harness the polymorphic possibilities of narrative, as a means for rethinking the place of human beings within more-than-human environments, larger communities of creatural kinds. In the end, Blauer must borrow from the whole heritage of narrative-related concepts to be able to untell the tale of who and what he is, and thereby come into his own through a process of self-unmaking. In tracing the vicissitudes of its anti-hero's education and career, the novel hybridizes several genres and styles of writing, including fiction and memoir, criticism and testimony, story-creation and story-analysis.