NARRATIVE AS RHETORIC (original) (raw)

Narrative as rhetoric: Technique, audiences, ethics, ideology

1996

In Narrative as Rhetoric, James Phelan explores the Preface xiii Preston. These people have each provided crucial material support and invaluable criticism and advice; without them, this book would be a lesser thing. To Peter J. Rabinowitz, I owe a special thanks: he read it all-much of it more than once-with a wonderful combina tion of generosity and rigor, and then took the time to walk me through his responses. In short, he exemplified what it means to enter into an authorial audience without losing oneself in the process. Fi nally, I am thankful for the rhetorical community in which I find most favor, that provided by my wife, Betty Menaghan, and our two chil dren, Katie and Mike; this one is for all of you. Different versions of the following chapters have appeared, in whole or in part, in the following publications. I thank all of them for permis sion to reprint. Chapter 1 as "Character and Judgment in Narrative and in Lyric: Toward an Understanding of Audience Engagement in The Waves."

Style and Rhetoric of Short Narrative Fiction

In many fi ctional narratives, the progression of the plot exists in tension with a very different and powerful dynamic that runs, at a hidden and deeper level, throughout the text. In this book, Dan Shen systematically investigates how stylistic analysis is indispensable for uncovering this covert progression through rhetorical narrative criticism. The book brings to light the covert progressions in works by the American writers Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen Crane, and Kate Chopin, and the British writer Katherine Mansfi eld. The analysis shows that to miss the covert progression is to get only a partial or false picture of the thematics, the characters, and the aesthetic values of the narrative.

Narrative as Communication (Minneapolis University Press, 1989)

1989

Review by Ruth Ronen, from Poetics Today http://www.jstor.org/stable/1772657 Twenty-odd years after T. Todorov coined the term "narratology," the area denoted by this term reveals a most heterogeneous reality: of conflicting traditions, incompatible specialized terms, and intractable bibliographies. It is the aim of Narrative as Communicationb oth to provide a coherent picture of the field of narratology and, at the same time, to recover a plausible principle of organization for it. Coste draws up an inventory of analytic tools and concepts, from the transformational model to literariness, fictionality, and subjects of narrative utterances, showing that these can constitute a workable apparatus for the study of narrative, although not in the terms in which they were originally conceived. The new grounds on which one should conceive these tools and concepts are those of a theory of social communication. Coste's working hypothesis is that narrative formulates a special type of communicative act in which a transitive view of the world is the effect imparted by the message produced. A message is narrative, not because of the mode of conveying it, but because it carries narrative meaning. A communication is narrative regardless of the form it takes (verbal or otherwise); narrative makes an object of knowledge of a narrative type for its recipients. But, for Coste, portraying a narratology in the alternative terms of a theory of communication does not suffice. His aim is to alert users of narratology to the ideological, political, and ethical implications of interpretive schemata on which they rely; it is, in other words, the history of narratology that has to be taken into account when constructing a communication-based narratology. When existing narratologies are treated as works in progress and as indispensable bases for working toward a new stage in the history of the field, this requires close scrutiny of the various controversies that have developed within narratology over the years. In the same way that the text produced in narrative communication is always a present, living object of knowledge, so is the field of narratology not to be discarded or treated as an obsolete document buried in history. Successive chapters in Coste's book are dedicated to examining the relations between individual narrative utterances and macronarrative significance through textual communication; to coming to grips with the literariness of literary communication; to placing the rhetoric of reference within a theory of narrative; to studying narrative agents and the problem of agential functions as narrative types; to the operations (of reading and inscribing) pertinent to the representation of enunciation in narrative; to the possibility of constructing a narrative syntax (in Coste's conception this cannot be a syntax of deep structures of actions, but a model of operations that takes into account the surface of textual communication); to genres as a sociohistorical constraint in narrative discourse; and to the differences between narrative and didactic worlds and messages.

Debating Rhetorical Narratology: On the Synthetic, Mimetic, and Thematic Aspects of Narrative

2020

Title: Debating rhetorical narratology : on the synthetic, mimetic, and thematic aspects of narrative / Matthew Clark and James Phelan. Description: Columbus : The Ohio State University Press, 2020. | Series: Theory and interpretation of narrative | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: "Two narratologists engage in a lively debate about three core concepts in rhetorical narratology, the mimetic, thematic, and synthetic. Grounded in narratives ranging from the Iliad to Beloved, the debate shows the power of both narrative theory and narrative itself "-Provided by publisher.

Classical Rhetoric Retold: Re-Mapping the Territory

1993

In the process of delegitimating the master narratives that have sustained Western civilization in the past, Postmodernism provoked a "crisis in narrative" which Francois Lyotard describes as narrativity that presents a sense of loss but not of what is lost. Recent histories of rhetoric have promulgated the view that rhetorical maps never reflect a neutral reality, but despite attempts at objectivity, unavoidably reflect the writer's perspective. Fortunately, rhetorical scholars of every stripe are involved in various re-tellings and remappings of rhetorical history, all acknowledging the political nature of their work and the biases mined in their own rhetorical territory. In particular, the recent body of historiography in which feminist researchers recover and recuperate women's contributions to the broad history of culture-making constitutes a new, more scenic excursion into the history of rhetoric. By following the arguments set forth by Joan Wallach Scott,Thomas Laqueur, Anne Fausto-Sterling, and others, (that culture and gender are overlapping, symbiotic, mutually imprinting, ever-evolving categories) it is possible to more accurately chart and account for those gendered limits and powers that lie on the borders of rhetorical history. As the histories of rhetoric are retold a new frontier is crossed. But it is well to be wary, for narratives of gender analysis can harbor the same overly grandiose and totalizing concepts as those now-disputed "grand narratives" of old to which Lyotard refers. (Twenty-eight references and two illustrations are attached.) (SAM)

Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method

Comparative Literature, 1980

But to answer for methodological giddiness, even strabismus, by invoking science perhaps involves some fraud. I will there fore plead the same case differently: perhaps the real relation ship between "theoretical" dryness and critical meticulousness is one of refreshing rotation and mutual entertainment. May the reader also find in that relationship a sort of periodic diversion, like the insomniac turning over and over in search of a better position: amant altema Camenae. 2 2 [Translator's note.] "Alternate strains are to the Muses dear." Virgil, Ec logues, III.59, trans. James Rhoades, The Poems of Virgil (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952). should be recounted sometimes by Homer and sometimes by Ulysses himself. Yet we know (and I will return to this later) that Plato long ago found this subject worth his attention. As its title indicates, or almost indicates, my study basically has to do with the most widespread meaning of the term narra tive, that is, with narrative discourse, which in literature, and particularly in the case that interests me, happens to be a narra tive text. But, as we will see, analysis of narrative discourse as I this point Genette speaks of the acceptability of his terms with respect to current French usage, and apropos of histoire ("story"), he refers to Tzvetan Todorov's by now "fairly well accepted. ,. proposal to differentiate 'narrative as discourse' (first meaning) and 'narrative as story' (second meaning)." He also explains his use of a term generally unfamiliar in America but used frequently in this book: "With the same meaning ["story"!, I will also use the term diegesis; which comes to us from the theoreticians of cinematographic narrative." 1 Order Narrative Time? Narrative is a ... doubly temporal sequence .... There is the time of the thing told and the time of the narrative (the time of the signified and the time of the signifier). This duality not only ren ders possible all the temporal distortions that are commonplace in narratives (three years of the hero's life summed up in two sentences of a novel or in a few shots of a "frequentative" montage in film, etc.). More basically, it invites us to consider that one of the functions of narrative is to invent one time scheme in terms of another time scheme. 1 28 RH \, 4401P I, 578. 29 "Girl-cousin (a little one), My initiator: I, 578 [pIRH I, 440]," imperturbably and precisely notes the Clarac and Ferre index of the names of the characters, 30 It is true that she has two adjoining rooms, and goes into one while the other is being aired out (RH I, 37-38iP I, 49). But if that were the situation, the scene becomes extremely hazardous, On the other hand, the relationship is not clear between this "sofa" and the bed described on p. 38 (RH IIP I, 50), with its flowered quilt having a "nondescript, resinous, dull, indigestible, and fruity smell" where Marcel when very young, "with an unconfessed gluttony," always returned to "bury" himself. Let us leave this problem to the specialists, and remember that in the "Confession d' une Jeune FilIe" of Les Plaisirs et les jours the "initiation" involves the fourteen-year-old heroine and a "cousin, a boy of fif teen ... already very depraved" (Pleiade, p. 87; Pleasures and Regrets, trans, Louise Varese l)Jew York, 1948l, p. 34).

Narrative as Rhetoric in The Faerie Queene

English Literary Renaissance, 1991

arrative and rhetoric are terms that commentators on The Faerie Queene perennially couple, distinguish, and question, and this essay will continue the discussion, although the questions I ask will reflect some of the new interests and viewpoints that have emerged in recent criticism since the middle of the last decade. My question about narrative takes as its point of departure the old observation, most emphatically insisted on by C. S. Lewis, that Spenser is an accomplished storyteller whose poetry has the qualities we value in storytelling. The question is, does it make a difference if, instead of merely reading the poem as a piece of storytelling, we approach it as a poem that represents storytelling, and does so in a manner that isn't innocent, a manner that interrogates the values and motives, the politics and ideology, embedded in the structure of storytelling? My reason for asking this question is that I want to see whether such an approadh can be illuminated by recent attempts to distinguish between the commitments of oral discourse and those of written discourse.