Abstract In this keynote talk, I will discuss my notions of narrative agency and the sense of the possible, their interconnections and their relevance for possibility studies. I will thereby seek to bring possibility studies in dialogue with interdisciplinary narrative studies.

I suggest that our sense of the possible – our sense of how things could be otherwise – is culturally, socially, and historically mediated, and narratives play an important role in this mediation. Narratives shape our life worlds as spaces of possibility by enabling or encouraging certain experiences and delimiting or discouraging others. I suggest that particularly productive for possibility studies is the approach of narrative hermeneutics, which argues that narratives are not mere representations of a series of events or universal cognitive strategies but, instead, culturally mediated interpretative practices that have existential significance: they provide us with models of sense-making that mediate our ways of being in the world with others, we are constituted in dialogue with them, and they expand and diminish our sense of the possible. Individual narratives are part of broader narrative environments that are constituted through a dynamic of master and counter narratives. While culturally dominant narratives can strengthen stereotypes in ways that diminish our sense of the possible, literature and other arts can challenge them and provide us with new possibilities of experience, affect, thought, and action. Literature can thereby open up new possibilities of agency. I will illustrate this by taking examples of master and counter narratives of cancer. It is not only the content of cultural narratives of cancer that shape the experience of illness and its social perception but also the form of cancer narratives is relevant.

In this talk, I emphasize that our agency, too, is narratively mediated. The cultural narrative webs in which we are entangled shape how we orient ourselves to the world and understand our place in it – our sense of who we are and could be. By narrative agency, I mean our ability to navigate our narrative environments: to use, (re)interpret, and engage with narratives that are culturally available to us, to analyse and challenge them, and to practice agential choice over which narratives we use and how we narrate our lives, relationships, and the world around us. Possibility studies and narrative studies can together strengthen our narrative agency for example by making visible the narrative webs in which we are entangled, by cultivating a critical and creative relationship to our narrative environments, and by fostering our ability to imagine new modes of narratively mediated relationality in dialogue with others. This can provide us with more existential breathing space when we go through experiences of crisis that involve fundamental uncertainty, and contribute to our understanding of the significance of narrative imagination for us as futural beings.