James Phelan

This essay responds to scholarly skepticism about narrative as argument, due to its reliance on hindsight effects (because such and such happened, then so and so must be the causes), and its tendency to develop inadequate analogies or to overgeneralize from single cases. The essay contends that, while some uses of narrative as argument display these problems, they are not inherent in narrative itself. It offers warrants for that contention by (a) proposing a conception of narrative as rhetoric and (b) using that conception to analyze two essays by Atul Gawande, “On Washing Hands” (2007) and “Letting Go” (2014) that rely heavily on narrative as part of their larger problem-solution argumentative structure. The analysis leads to the conclusion that a skillful author can, depending on his or her overall purposes, use narrative either as a mode of argument in itself or as a means of supporting arguments made through non-narrative means—and can even use both approaches within a single pi...

While writing this foreword, I assumed that I should yield to the inevitable and title it "Before Reading Before Reading" or perhaps "Before Reading Squared/1 have now, however, decided to resist the inevitable in favor of the literal—and its implied challenge of giving a new spin to the common phrase "reading a book in its own terms." Here's why: As Peter J. Rabinowitz explains early in the in­ troduction, the book's purpose is "to explore . . . the ways in which Western readers' prior knowledge of conventions of reading shapes their experiences and evaluations of the narratives they confront" (3). But much in Rabinowitz's exploration of conventions, I gradu­ ally realized, can apply not just to narratives but also to critical texts. Consequently, Before Reading itself provides the most useful terms and concepts to illuminate Rabinowitz's distinctive theoreti­ cal project. The reading of Rabinowitz's title refers to what he...

David Herman a proposé en 1999 le terme narratologie postclassique pour décrire l’état de la recherche en narratologie faisant suite à la profusion de révisions apportées à l’approche structuraliste. La vigueur du mouvement postclassique ne s’est pas démentie depuis, avec une série de contributions importantes dans les domaines de la narratologie féministe, cognitive et postcoloniale, par exemple, mais également avec l’avènement d’approches totalement nouvelles, telles que la narratologie « n..

This essay examines President Donald J Trump's storytelling over twenty-seven days in spring 2020 in order to explore the ways in which his performances threatened to destroy the genre of nonfiction political narrative in the United States The analysis of these twenty-seven days is framed by a Preface, written from the perspective of January 2021 after the attack on the US Capitol by those who believed Trump's Big Lie that he won the 2020 presidential election—an attack indicating that Trump had almost succeeded in destroying the genre By the spring of 2020, Trump had all but eroded that genre's foundations in referentiality, and his Republican supporters in Congress, in right-wing media, and in the electorate had allowed him to operate on the principle that "my saying makes things so " The events of the spring of 2020, however, especially those accompanying the COVID-19 pandemic, provided the greatest resistance to that principle, because the virus was an extratextual reality that was indifferent to Trump's rhetoric The essay is itself an unfolding narrative, as it traces Trump's storytelling about the pandemic, voting by mail, Barack Obama, and, toward the end of the period, about George Floyd's murder and the protests that followed This thick description of Trump's performances does not end with a definitive judgment about the fate of the genre of nonfiction political narrative, but instead offers insights into the nature and relentlessness of Trump's attack on that genre that in turn shed light on his Big Lie about the 2020 presidential election [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Narrative is the property of Ohio State University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use This abstract may be abridged No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract (Copyright applies to all Abstracts )

In the summer of 2018, James Phelan co-organized the Summer Seminar on Narratology on behalf of Project Narrative at Ohio State University, in collaboration with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and the journal Frontiers of Narrative Studies. During this period, Shang Biwu, the editor of Frontiers of Narrative Studies, had a conversation with Phelan, who talked about important issues such as rhetorical poetics, fictionality, and narrative communication.

1. HOW ARE YOU? A voice addresses you. Not from clouds, a mountaintop, or a burning bush. From this page. It asks how you are and what you're up to. It is a friendly, though unfamiliar, voice. You are unsure of how to react. You have an impulse to shout out that you're fine, you're reading, you'd be grateful not to be disturbed. But you also don't want to be rude, so you just say "OK" and "studying second-person narration." The voice wants to know if you've read Lorrie Moore's Self-Help. Oh yes, you say, in fact, you've just begun reading an essay about it. The voice asks what the essay's about and if it's any good. You can't tell yet; so far the critic seems more interested in showing off his cleverness than in saying anything about Moore's book. If he doesn't quit, you'll quit reading. OK, says the voice, fair enough; I'll go mute, if you promise to stick around. In fact, to erase the sound of my voice, let's listen to Lorrie Moore's at the beginning of her short story "How": Begin by meeting him in a class, a bar, at a rummage sale. Maybe he teaches sixth grade. Manages a hardware store. Foreman at a carton factory. He will be a good dancer. He will have perfectly cut hair. He will laugh at your jokes. A week, a month, a year. Feel discovered, comforted, needed, loved, and start sometimes, somehow, to feel bored. When sad or confused, walk uptown to the movies. Buy popcorn. These things come and go. A week, a month, a year. (55) 2. WHO ARE YOU? Perhaps this question would be better phrased as "Who are the 'you's?'" to indicate that it refers to the second-person addressees in the two texts of the previous section (i.e., the text of this article and Moore's text) rather than to you who are now reading the words of this sentence. The rephrasing does sharpen the question, but, as we shall soon see, trying to answer it will call the logic that motivates the sharpening into doubt. The rephrased question depends on a clear and stable distinction between an intrinsic, textual "you" - a narratee-protagonist - and an extrinsic, extratextual "you" - a flesh-and-blood reader. Both texts, however, undermine the clarity and stability of the distinction. In the first text, the "you" addressed by the voice "from this page" is both textual and extratextual: it refers not only to the narratee-protagonist but also to "you" the actual reader.(1) The "you" who is unsure of how to react may or may not be both narratee and actual reader: at that moment, the discourse is blurring the boundaries between them. At the end of the paragraph, the "you" addressed by the voice is again textual and extratextual, and the shift to homodiegetic narration (from "the voice" to "I") foregrounds that dual address. Moreover, this play with the location (textual and/or extratextual) of the addressee is only part of the text's story of reading. When we read "You are unsure of how to react" and recognize that the "you" who is narratee-protagonist need not coincide with "you" the actual reader, another audience position becomes prominent: the observer role familiar to us in reading homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narration, the position from which we watch characters think, move, talk, act. In fact, what happens as we read "You are unsure of how to react" is frequently an important dimension of reading second-person narration: when the second-person address to a narratee-protagonist both overlaps with and differentiates itself from an address to actual readers, those readers will simultaneously occupy the positions of addressee and observer. Furthermore, the fuller the characterization of the "you," the more aware actual readers will be of their differences from that "you," and thus, the more fully they will move into the observer role, and the less likely this role will overlap with the addressee position. In other words, the greater the characterization of the "you," the more like a standard protagonist the "you" becomes, and, consequently, the more actual readers can employ their standard strategies for reading narrative. …

There are two prominent features of contemporary literary criticism that give the pluralist his initial direction. First, the field is marked by a multiplicity of discourses: formalism, deconstruction, new historicism, feminism, Marxism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, to name just a few, as well as various syntheses of two or more of these discourses. Second, the domi nant activity of literary critics is, as it has been since the rise of the New Criticism in the 1930s, the interpretation of individual texts. When faced with the task of sorting out the relations among the different interpretations offered by the different discourses, the pluralist, by definition, will want to say that many of them (or at the very least more than one) are equally valid (though they give different accounts of the same textual features) and simultaneously that some interpretations are weaker than others. Stated this way, the position seems straightforward (and, I hope, appealing). Yet once the pluralist begins to follow this direction, to work out the implications of this general stance, he very quickly becomes involved in many knotty issues that take him right to the disciplinary core of criticism. In the rest of this essay, I shall explore several of those issues, including (1) whether the move to pluralism also commits one to metapluralism (and thus, metametapluralism, and so on) and (2) whether pluralism as a metaposition has any genuine consequences for practical criticism. I shall begin, however, not with either of those important issues but with one that is both more dif ficult and more fundamental: how does the pluralist define the literary text?

Gentlepersons, I know that many of you are skeptical about lending the name of your organization to any crass commercial enterprises. And frankly, despite Professor Wright's invitation to me, I suspect that to many of you Swift, Clements, Shaw, and Allen, with its position as the volume leader of the advertising business, is synonymous with Crass Commerce. Let me reassure you: I think such skepticism is a healthy thing-I was skeptical too when I first explored the idea of using literary characters to endorse commercial goods and services. If some consumers object to Geraldine Ferraro's plugging Pepsi, we should pause over their possible reactions to Arthur Dimmesdale's endorsing Vick's Vapo-Rub ("relieves chest pain, fast, fast, fast"). But the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that it was both an idea whose time had come and an idea that would be mutually beneficial. For we are planning to use the power of advertising not just to create the consumer's desire for the various products of our free enterprise system but also to arouse Mr., Ms., and Mrs. Consumer's passion for Masterworks of Literature. We at Swift, Clements, Shaw, and Allen think the marketplace is ripe for such a campaign. Professor Wright thinks I might convince you as well. I understand from Professor Wright that you and your colleagues believe you could have much more success teaching Western literature, much more satisfactory experiences connecting Shakespeare, Flaubert, Yeats, and Woolf to their own cultures and to ours, if your students were already somehow connected to their works. By joining forces with us, you can get that connection. Together we can see to it that no one walks into a freshman literature class without knowing who Pamela Andrews, Emma Bovary, Sancho Panza-you name the character-is.

my taxi gets the Hutu in me dancing,” and soon he is imagining himself “on all fours eating grass / So I can throw up because I like the feeling. / I crouch over a carcass and practice my eating.” Is this a daring revelation of one’s inner demons? I suppose so, but when we note that the poet who has these fleeting thoughts is comfortably inside his taxi, most often on the Upper East Side where he lives so well, the admission seems merely tasteless. If you like the tell-all nastiness encountered here, you may well chuckle along with these images of Seidel’s frayed nerve ends. To me, these oh-so-witty and painful psychodramas feel like a throwback to the worst of John Berryman and Robert Lowell in the 1950s. In 2010, who needs it?

... London when Joe comes to nurse him through his illness and then through his being appropriately chastened for his dream of marrying Biddy by arriving ... Wem-mick's self-division functions to deepen our sense of what it is that Pip must over-come as he slowly comes to accept ...

A couple of weeks ago, while I was in the throes of drafting a paper about the significant alterations in Wayne Booth's thinking implied by his developing the concept of coduction in The Company We Keep, I received a rather amazing letter. As soon as I read it, I realized that it contained a far more appropriate assessment of Booth's evolving thoughts about the relations among authors, texts, and readers than anything my lugubrious analysis would yield. This letter, as you'll see, is far from unqualified praise of Booth, but I believe it gets at aspects of his work that a more reverential approach would just plain miss.

Abstract Rhetorical literary ethics are part and parcel of the larger rhetorical inter-change between authors and audiences offered by literary texts; in this respect, ethics are an intrinsic part of (rhetorical) form. More specifically, this rhetorical ethics attends to the interactions among ...

Today’s undergraduate literature courses are noticeably different from those of even ten years ago in their frequent use of essays of literary criticism and theory. Including these critical arguments often enriches discussion and student understanding by providing students with new terms and concepts for analyzing texts and by showing them how knowledge gets constructed in literary studies. But including this material also has a downside: students often find it difficult to comprehend and, thus, more alienating than engaging. Many teachers sensibly work against this risk by furnishing various guides to understanding, including straightforward summary and explication. Here I describe a different approach, one that explicitly challenges students to confront the difficulties of the material by working through a “matrix of understanding,” either as a written exercise or as part of an initial discussion of the argument. The matrix provides a way to emphasize that any one argument is part of a larger analytic approach. Once the students complete the matrix, we move to “overstanding,” Wayne C. Booth’s (1979) term for the act of assessing a position’s powers and limits. In this essay I illustrate the approach by analyzing Stanley Fish’s “Interpreting the Variorum.” First published in Critical Inquiry in 1976 and then included as a chapter in Is There a Text in This Class? in 1980, the essay announces Fish’s pivotal shift from locating meaning in the reader’s processing of a text (what he had called “affective stylistics”) to locating meaning in the strategies of different interpretive communities. Fish develops the consequences of this shift in the later chapters of Is There a Text in This Class? and his case for interpretive communities has had a significant effect on scholarly conversations about textual interpretation, about percepts and concepts, about social

The current study of literary narrative is a vibrant and various activity, marked not by a single orthodoxy but by multiple approaches. Within that variety there are five especially salient issues currently being investigated: nonmimetic narrative; digital narrative; the fact/fiction distinction; narrative space; and rhetorical aesthetics. Rhetorical aesthetics moves not toward a universal standards of literary quality but toward an understanding of how narratives work on their own terms and of appropriate general criteria for judging those terms. These criteria, as a comparison of the endings of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and Howard Hawks’s adaptation of the novel to film suggests, typically are not purely aesthetic but involve the interrelation of form, ethics, and aesthetics.

The essay argues for a rhetorical view of narrative communication as an author’s deployment of particular resources in order to generate certain responses in readers, and then examines the nature and possible functions of voice as a resource. It defines voice as the synthesis of style (diction and syntax), tone (a speaker’s attitude toward an utterance) and values (ideological and ethical), and then turns to analyzing the role of voice—and more particularly, the role of tone—in narrative communication. With George V Higgins’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle as Exhibit A, the essay examines the functions of voice and tone in fictional dialogue, and with Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking as Exhibit B, it examines their role in nonfictional narration. The essay concludes with a call for further analyses of voice and tone, even as it cautions that their roles may be more or less important as we move from one narrative to another.

Title: Beyond the Tenure Track: Fifteen Months in the Life of an English Professor. ... Beyond the Tenure Track: Fifteen Months in the Life of an English Professor. ... Ohio State University Press, 1070 Carmack Road, Columbus, OH 43210 ($42.50 hard copy--ISBN-0-8142-0535 ...

READING" Now I Lay Me" is a moving yet disconcerting experience. This claim makes for a succinct opening sentence, but it also raises two questions: What do I mean by" experience"? And is experience something that remains the same or varies from one ...

JP: With our choices framed this way, I'll go for what's behind door number 3. Not even the most ardent ecopantheist would argue that we owe something to inanimate marks on paper-and I have deep doubts about divinity of any kind. But the trouble with picking door number 3 is, of course, that there's nothing behind it: no controversy, no debate, no interest. Of course we don't owe texts anything. Turn the page. But there is something behind the question-a debate about how we should conduct and assess interpretations. What we need to avoid in this debate, though, is the assumption that there is one true path. Methods of interpretation are subordinate to the purposes of interpretation, and those purposes are multiple. If I want to know something about the structure, organization, and design of, say, Middlemarch, I will do one sort of analysis, whereas if I want to know how the novel's discourse about a given cultural issue fits with or runs counter to the discourse about that issue in other arenas-the law, the popular press, government documents-I will do a very different kind of analysis. Furthermore, I may decide that in my own cultural circumstances the best approach to some literary icon is irreverence: enough already about Thomas Pynchon; what he needs is a good debunking. In all

In the domain of narrative theory, Wayne C. Booth’s two most important books are The Rhetoric of Fiction and The Company We Keep.1 The Rhetoric of Fiction remains required reading for narrative theorists because it gives us terms and concepts such as implied author and unreliable narrator that we still find productive (and worthy of debate), because it demonstrates the fallacious reasoning underlying abstract rules such as ‘showing is better than telling’ (such reasoning mistakes means for ends), and because it has paved the way for an understanding of any novel, and more broadly, any narrative as a rhetorical action: an author’s attempt to harness all the resources of storytelling for the purpose of evoking a set of effects (cognitive, emotional, ethical) in an audience. The Company We Keep remains required reading because it develops that rhetorical understanding of the novel as it investigates the nature and importance of the ethical effects of fiction. More specifically, Company explores the metaphor of books-as-friends by identifying the variety of invitations that authors extend to audiences (from subtle seductions to in-your-face challenges) and by calling attention to the patterns of desire that such invitations – and the narrative trajectories that follow from them– lead their audiences to experience. Both books