Ricoeur and the Girls

Abstract

Schoolgirls writing short stories have surrendered themselves to some rules of a game, which, according to Ricoeur and Gadamer, delimits a field where everything ’is played’, and thereby, ’shatters the seriousness’ of ’the self-presence of a subject’. This article proposes that this field has a serious side of its own that reveals something true about the everyday reality of being a girl. The proposed worlds in the girls’ short stories are places from which research on women’s lives should begin is a central argument, along with the contention that for the researcher to be able to take the seriousness of this playful writing into account, she also has to assume the position of a playful figure. The article suggests that the empirical data of schoolgirl writing invited the researcher to think Ricoeur and feminist epistemology together. Further, a suggestion is that the roles of reading given by the texts have consequences for a ’new’ process-oriented writing pedagogy and the teacher of writing as well.