NARRATIVE AS RHETORIC: TECHNIQUE, AUDIENCES, ETHICS, IDEOLOGY

Abstract

In Narrative as Rhetoric, James Phelan explores the consequences for narrative theory of two signifi cant principles: (1) narrative is rhetoric because narrative occurs when someone tells a particular story for a particular audience in a particular situ ation for some particular purpose (s); (2) the read ing of narrative is a multidimensional activity, simultaneously engaging our intellects, emotions, ideologies, and ethics.Narrative as Rhetoric consists often essays, each of which explores these principles in connection with interpretative problems posed by one of the following narratives: William Makepeace Thack eray's Vanity Fair, Virginia Woolf's The Waves, Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and "My Old Man," F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Joseph Conrad's The Secret Sharer, Lorrie Moore's "How," Dinesh D'Souza's/ZZifcera/ Education, and Toni Morrison's Beloved.The rhetorical theory of narrative that emerges from these investigations emphasizes the recur sive relationships between authorial agency, text ual phenomena, and reader response, even as it remains open to insights from a range of critical approaches-including feminism, psychoanalysis, Bakhtinian linguistics, and cultural studies.The rhetorical criticism Phelan advocates and employs seeks, above all, to attend carefully to the multiple demands of reading sophisticated narrative; for that reason, his rhetorical theory moves less to ward predictions about the relationships between techniques, ethics, and ideologies and more to ward developing some principles and concepts that allow us to recognize the complex diversity of narrative art.Written with clarity and flair and experiment ing at times with the conventions of critical writ ing, this collection, which includes some of Preface This book did me the great favor of sneaking up on me.I wrote it while procrastinating on a different, seemingly more daunting project.I'd get to that large body of work, I told myself many times over the last few years, right after scratching this itch, massaging that cramp, scrubbing away this dirt.After a while, I realized that I'd done so much scratching and scrubbing that I'd managed to create something with a discernible identity of its own.Whether the coherence and magnitude of this creature is sufficient-or sufficiently attractive-for anyone to want to spend much time in its company remains to be seen.But it is worth noticing here that the coherence derives from my consistent attempt to think through what it means to say that narrative is rhetoric, even as I've worked on the range of issues that give the book its first claim to magnitude: voice, progression, mimesis, the eth ics of reading, kinds of textual recalcitrance, the paradoxes of first-per son (or homodiegetic) narration, the role of ideology in telling and interpreting nonfictional narratives.At the same time, the thinking through occurs very much in connection with the practical work of interpreting particular narratives, and the range of these texts consti tutes the other claim to magnitude: short stories by Joseph Conrad,

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