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Approach of the Seminar and Intellectual Rationale
As I briefly explain on the welcome page, the seminar will explore the answers to its central question--what is it about character, plot, and ways of telling that make narrative such an important way of organizing and explaining experience and knowledge?--provided by a rhetorical theory of narrative and by a range of fictional and nonfictional narratives themselves.
The seminar will have two major units: (1) the exploration of rhetorical theory and its conception of the connection between rhetoric and ethics; (2) the placement of rhetorical theory in relation to other branches of narrative theory, including other approaches to ethics, feminist narratology, and cognitive narratology. Throughout both units, we will turn to the narrative texts not only to apply the theories but also to challenge them. Indeed, one of our principles will be that narrative theory should follow the lead of narrative artists not dictate to them. One issue that we will examine from multiple perspectives is the rhetoric and ethics of unreliable narration.
The two main goals of the seminar will be to enable the participants to become (1) better teachers of narrative by deepening their understanding of how narrative works and of the analytical tools of rhetorical theory; and (2) better researchers by enhancing their ability to contribute to the current debates in field.
The rhetorical model takes as its first principle the idea that narrative is itself a rhetorical act, and it defines narrative as someone telling someone else on some occasion and for some purpose that something happened. This emphasis on narrative as an act and on the teller, the audience, occasion, and purpose distinguishes the rhetorical model from the more strictly formalist approach of narratology, which defines narrative as the recounting of two or more related events, neither of which logically presupposes or entails the other. This definition regards narrative as a product rather than an act and it emphasizes the “something [that] happened.”
The rhetorical approach also views the communication from author to audience as inviting a multi-layered response, one that simultaneously engages the audience cognitively, psychically, emotionally, and ethically. How we interpret a character’s action, for example, influences both our affective and ethical responses to that character and those responses in turn influence our desires and hopes for that character’s fate. In addition, the model assumes that authorial agency, textual phenomena (including intertextual relations), and reader response exist in an ongoing feedback loop. That is, texts are designed by authors in order to affect readers in particular ways; those designs are conveyed through the language, techniques, structures, forms, and dialogic relations of texts as well as the genres and conventions readers use to understand them; and reader responses are a function, guide, and test of how authorial designs are constructed through textual and intertextual phenomena. Methodologically, a critic may begin an interpretive inquiry with author, text, or reader, but will inevitably consider how the chosen starting point both influences and is influenced by the other two.
The concept of narrative progression, for example, refers to the trajectory of the reader’s developing interests in a narrative from its beginning through its middle to its end, but to describe that trajectory of interests the rhetorical critic must move to the textual phenomena that guide it—the instabilities between or among characters and the tensions between or among authors, narrators, and audiences—and to the author’s choices about such things as modes of characterization and the order of the events in the telling. Furthermore, because the model is interested in the connections between the narrative’s construction and the interaction of its values and those of the reader, it readily opens out to questions of narrative ethics. It pays attention both to the ethics of what is told, that is, the ethical dimensions of the characters’ choices, and the ethics of the telling, that is, the ethical dimensions of the relations among author, narrator, and audience. To illustrate the model, I offer this brief rhetorical analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.” (1852)).
Poe’s first paragraph introduces the story’s main instabilities and tensions and invites an abundance of narrative judgments.
The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that I gave utterance to a threat. At length I would be avenged; this was a point definitively settled—but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved, precluded the idea of risk. I must not only punish, but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong.
The main instabilities involve the relation between Montresor and Fortunato and between Montresor and himself, or more specifically, his code of revenge: the forward movement of the narrative is generated in large part by our double interest in what will happen between the two characters and whether what happens means that Montresor executes the revenge according to the code. The forward movement is also influenced by our awareness of the tensions generated by Montresor’s unreliability as an ethical evaluator. To assume that insults are not only worse than injuries but also cause for carrying out an elaborate revenge is to reveal a seriously deficient value system, one that places personal pride above the value of human life. On the readerly side, consequently, our interest in the progression involves not just whether Montresor will succeed with the revenge but our tentative ethical judgment that, if he does, he will prove himself to be an extremely cold, cruel, and clever individual—simultaneously fascinating and repulsive. At the same time, this first paragraph begins our engagement with Poe as the creator of this extraordinary character, and it raises questions about the ethical value of that engagement.
Between the first paragraph and the last, the progression of the action proceeds very smoothly, as Montresor recounts all but the last step in his successful execution of his plan for revenge. Montresor takes advantage of Fortunato’s own pride, luring him into his (Montresor’s) cavernous wine cellar on the pretext of needing Fortunato’s opinion of a new shipment of Amontillado. Once in the catacombs, Montresor chains Fortunato to a wall and buries him alive by building a tomb of bricks around him. Poe uses dialogue to carry the middle of the progression, dialogue that tacitly shows how brilliantly and with what great enjoyment Montresor manipulates the inebriated Fortunato. At the end Fortunato sobers up and becomes acutely conscious of Montresor as avenger. Fortunato’s last words are a plea for mercy: “For the love of God, Montresor!” Shortly after this plea, Poe writes his ending.
I thrust a torch through the remaining aperture and let it fall within. There came forth in return only a jingling of the bells. My heart grew sick—on account of the dampness of the catacombs. I hastened to make an end of my labour. I forced the last stone into its position; I plastered it up. Against the new masonry I re-erected the old rampart of bones. For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them. In pace requiescat!
This paragraph highlights one of the especially salient features of narration in fiction: the same text is used for two distinct acts of telling with two distinct purposes, one act and purpose involving the narrator (Montresor) in relation to his audience and the other act and purpose involving the author (Poe) and his audience. Crucial to our understanding of the relation between the two acts of telling here is our recognition that a new note creeps into Montresor’s telling when he reports “my heart grew sick.” Although Montresor quickly supplies the cause—the dampness of the catacombs—Poe, by placing the report at the moment when Montresor realizes that Fortunato has stopped struggling after his final quasi-religious plea, invites us to understand the heartsickness as a metaphorical one. Fortunato’s resignation brings Montresor face-to-face with the enormity of what he is doing: murdering a man as a response to being insulted by him. No wonder his heart grows sick.
The discrepancy between Montresor’s explanation for and our understanding of his heartsickness shows that here he is a reliable reporter (his heart did grow sick) but an unreliable interpreter and evaluator. He misinterprets the reason for his heartsickness because he misevaluates his own character, regarding it as more cold and calculating than it actually is. At the same time, Poe uses Montresor’s unreliable narration to indicate that Montresor has not fully succeeded in carrying out the revenge according to his code: the heartsickness is evidence that he has failed to punish Fortunato with impunity. At this point, Poe’s telling does not allow us to decide whether Montresor is aware of the gap between the code and the execution of the code or whether his denial of the reason for his heartsickness protects him from that awareness.
The relation between Montresor’s telling and Poe’s telling becomes more complex with Montresor’s comment that Fortunato’s grave has not been disturbed for fifty years. This comment links up with the revelation of his heartsickness to shed new light on the purpose of Montresor’s telling. Why tell the story fifty years after the event, and why tell it to one “who so well know[s] the nature of [his] soul?” Because the heartsickness Montresor felt at the climactic moment of his revenge has lingered for fifty years, motivating him now to seek some relief through confessing to one whom he regards in much the way that a regular penitent regards his priestly confessor. To be sure, Montresor remains too proud to confess outright (doing so would be a frank admission that he has failed to punish Fortunato with impunity), but we can now infer his purpose: to confess under the guise of boasting.
In these ways, the last paragraph adds significant new shadings to our ethical judgment of Montresor. He remains monstrous for what he has done and how he has done it, but his getting heartsick humanizes him to some degree. In addition, his need as narrator to hide his confession under the guise of boasting highlights the way his pride affects his telling, even as the confession itself is a remarkable acknowledgment of guilt. Turning to Poe's purposes and the ethics of his telling, we can conclude that he invites us to contemplate one end of the spectrum of human behavior and that he uses his ending to insist on both the extremity and the humanness of that behavior. More specifically, he invites us to engage, through our initial fascination with and repulsion from Montresor and our more nuanced final response, in a meditation on pride, guilt, and the powers and limits of confessional narrative.
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Project Faculty
I have spent a good part of my career working out my own version of a rhetorical theory of narrative and much of the rest of it thinking about its relation to other approaches to narrative. The results so far can be found in numerous essays and books on a range of narratives from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to Sandra Cisneros’s “Woman Hollering Creek.” My single-authored books consider a range of narrative issues named in their subtitles: Worlds from Words: A Theory of Language in Fiction; Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression and the Interpretation of Narrative; Narrative as Rhetoric: Essays on Technique, Audience, Ethics, and Ideology; Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration; and Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative. My other single-authored book, Beyond the Tenure Track: Fifteen Months in the Life of an English Professor, taught me some things about character narration and about the relations between autobiography and fiction. My recent contribution to the Fortieth Anniversary Edition of Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg’s The Nature of Narrative was a fifty-page chapter entitled “Narrative Theory, 1966-2006: A Narrative.” I am currently dividing my research time between two books that I have under contract: Narrative Theory: Contested Concepts, Rhetorical Solutions (co-authored with Peter J. Rabinowitz for Ohio State University Press), Reading the Twentieth-Century American Novel (in Blackwell Press’s Reading the Novel series). In addition, my work as editor of Narrative and as co-editor of The Ohio State University Press series on the Theory and Interpretation of Narrative keeps me immersed in the world of narrative theory.
Guest speakers: David Herman is Professor of English at Ohio State and the author, editor, or co-editor of six books in narrative theory, including the award-winning Story Logic (2002), is one of the leading cognitive narratologists in the world. Julia Watson, Associate Professor of Comparative Studies at Ohio State, is co-author of Reading Autobiography and co-editor of four collections of essays on autobiography. Julia also participated in my 1995 Summer Seminar when she was at California State University at Northridge.
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Overview of Seminar and Schedule of Readings
As noted above, the seminar will keep a consistent focus on rhetorical theory even as it puts different approaches to narrative into dialogue with each other around some specific issues and individual narrative texts. I will explicitly tell the participants that they should feel free to argue with the rhetorical approach and to favor other approaches. I want the implicit dialogue among our texts and the explicit dialogue among the group to be a valuable source of learning for us all.
We will meet three times a week in two and a half hour sessions. The first two sessions of the week will be devoted to our common reading list and, after the first week, the third session will be devoted to participants' projects. My past experience suggests that this format provides a good balance of group work on our shared texts and attention to the individual projects. In addition, I will hold an extra session over lunch one day in week 3 explicitly devoted to publishing. As noted above, we will have guest faculty for two of our sessions. I will also schedule individual meetings with the participants in the first week to discuss their projects and specific goals for the seminar.
The seminar will devote the first three weeks to the principles of the rhetorical approach, and to the larger issue of narrative ethics. The final three weeks will be devoted to the dialogue between rhetorical theory and the feminist and cognitive approaches as well as to the similarities and differences between the rhetoric and ethics of fictional and nonfictional narrative. I will consistently pair theoretical readings with narrative texts that put some pressure on the theoretical formulations so that we can develop healthy dialogue between theory and narrative, one in which the theory can be applied, tested, and perhaps revised even as it sheds light on the narratives.
Unit I: Narrative Theory and The Rhetorical Approach
Week 1: Overview of Narrative and Rhetorical Theory
Monday: Introduction: The ubiquity and significance of narrative
Wednesday: H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess,” Edith Wharton, “Roman Fever”; Peter Rabinowitz, “Truth in Fiction: A Re-examination of Audiences”
Friday: Robert Scholes, James Phelan, and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative Chapter 8: “Narrative Theory, 1966-2006: A Narrative”; Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, Chapters VII and VIII
Abbott’s book provides an excellent, brief survey of claims for the significance of narrative in culture as well as an overview of contemporary narrative theory. It will provide a useful context within which to situate the rhetorical approach. Chapter 8 of the Fortieth Anniversary Edition of The Nature of Narrative provides a helpful survey of the last forty years of narrative theory. Browning’s poem sets up our discussion of Rabinowitz’s useful rhetorical model of the multiple audiences of narrative. Wharton’s story is a rich resource for rhetorical analysis. Booth’s work provides necessary background for contemporary narrative theory, both rhetorical and otherwise.
Week 2-3: Rhetoric and Ethics, Application, and Testing
Monday: James Phelan, from Narrative as Rhetoric: “Narrative as Rhetoric: Reading the Spells of Porter’s ‘Magic’” and from Experiencing Fiction, “Introduction: Judgments, Progressions and the Seven Theses about Narrative Judgments”; Katherine Anne Porter, “Magic”; Edgar Allan Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado”
Wednesday: Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep, Chapters 6-7; Martha Nussbaum, Introduction to Love’s Knowledge Sandra Cisneros, “Barbie-Q”; Ernest Hemingway, “Indian Camp”
Friday: Participant Presentations. N.B. Each of the next four Fridays will also be devoted to participant presentations.
My essays articulate further principles of rhetorical theory and ethical criticism, and the chapters from Booth and Nussbaum foreground the relation between the analysis of technique and the analysis of ethics. The four short stories provide a broad range of examples for rhetorical and ethical analysis.
Week 3: Unreliable Narration and Narrative Ethics
Monday: Adam Zachary Newton, Narrative Ethics; Introduction, section on Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day. Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
Wednesday (AM session): James Phelan, Living to Tell about It, Chapter 1; “Estranging Unreliability, Bonding Unreliability, and the Ethics of Lolita” (continued)
Wednesday (session over lunch): Publishing in the field, including (a) a demonstration of how I make decisions as editor of Narrative; (b) sharing of experiences by participants; and (c) questions and answers.
Newton offers an excellent example of a theorist who draws on previous ethical thinkers—his are Levinas, Cavell, and Bakhtin—and on narrative theory to develop a narrative ethics. In doing so, he provides a worthwhile point of comparison to the rhetorical approach, a comparison that will be explicit in the comparison of his analysis of The Remains of the Day and mine in Living to Tell about It. Ishiguro’s novel is a brilliant example of unreliable narration, one in which the unreliability varies over the course of the narrative, and one that requires further considerations of the relation between technique and ethics. The essay on estranging and bonding unreliability offers a new angle on the relation between technique and ethics. Previous work on unreliability has assumed that its effect is to estrange the narrator from the audience, but I argue in this essay that sometimes, as in Huckleberry Finn’s decision to go to hell rather than betray Jim, the effect is bond the narrator more closely to the audience. Lolita is such an ethically complex text in part because of its combination of estranging and bonding unreliability.
Unit II: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Ethics
Week 4 Feminist Critique and Feminist Narratology
Monday: Margaret Homans, “Feminist Fictions and Feminist Theories of Narrative”; Ruth Page, “The Question of Gender and Form” from Literary and Linguistic Approaches to Feminist Narratology” Porter’s “Magic” and Cisneros’s “Barbie-Q” revisited; Ian McEwan, Atonement
Wednesday, Susan Lanser, Introduction to Fictions of Authority; Alison Case, Introduction to Plotting Women; Ian McEwan, Atonement
Homans and Page make a good juxtaposition because both are concerned with the connections between form and ideology in narrative, but Homans argue that they are sometimes interconnected and Page that they are not. Lanser and Case continue the seminar’s investigation of the relation between technique and ethics and raise the issue of the relation between ethics and politics. Lanser focuses on how women writers establish authority and Case on the difference between narrators who simply record events and those who actively design their narratives. These perspectives invite a new look at Porter’s “Magic” and Cisneros’s “Barbie-Q.” In addition, all four essays invite a consideration of the complex ethics of McEwan’s Atonement. McEwan delays the disclosure to his audience that we are reading a novel-within-a-novel and that the embedded novel is written by a female novelist who seeks to atone for a real transgression by narrating it—and radically changing its consequences.
Unit III: Week 5 Cognitive Narratology, Fiction, and Nonfiction
Monday: Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction (selections on Theory of Mind and unreliable narration) Atonement
Wednesday: David Herman, Stories as a Tool for Thinking. Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking Visit by David Herman.
Cognitive narratology offers a different approach to narrative form because it seeks to identify the mental tools, processes, and activities that make possible our ability to construct and understand narrative. In addition, cognitive narratology focuses on narrative itself as a tool of understanding, that is, on how narrative contributes to human beings’ efforts to structure and make sense of their world and their experiences within that world. Zunshine’s work on Theory of Mind and unreliable narration provides some productive new ways to think about technique and ethics in Atonement. Herman’s essay provides a frame work within which to understand Didion’s memoir as a way to cope with her husband’s death. As the author or editor of many books and essays in cognitive narratology, Herman will be an excellent resource for the group. Throughout the week, we will seek connections and conflicts among cognitive theory, feminist theory, and rhetorical theory.
Week 6: Unreliability and Ethics in Nonfictional Narrative
Monday: Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography (selections); Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes. Visit by Julia Watson
Wednesday:John Barbour, “Judging and Not Judging Parents”; Nancy K. Miller, “The Ethics of Betrayal”Julia Watson is a leading scholar in autobiography studies. In Reading Autobiography, she and Sidonie Smith offer an excellent overview of current issues in autobiography studies including ways to distinguish the narrator from the implied author that are especially relevant for the seminar. Frank McCourt chooses to narrate his memoir from the perspective of his naïve and ethically limited childhood self, thus leading us to address the issue of the ethics of unreliable autobiographical narration. Barbour and Miller both offer thoughtful reflections on the ethics of the autobiographer’s use of other people’s lives, reflections that are very relevant to McCourt’s work.(back to Welcome page)About ColumbusColumbus has many of the advantages of a large multicultural urban area without some of the disadvantages of more heavily populated cities. It offers many opportunities for extracurricular activities likely to be of interest to participants: Shakespeare in the park, poetry in the park, music of all kinds (classical, popular, jazz) in the open air and in concert halls. The Columbus Museum of Art frequently brings in special exhibits to supplement its already fine collection, and the University's own Wexner Center for the Arts has a very active exhibit series. The first Saturday of every month the art galleries in the Short North area of the city (about a mile and a half south of campus) sponsor tours at which they serve free wine and cheese. Those interested in athletic activities will have access to the university's extensive facilities, or can take advantage of the city's many bike and running trails and its extensive park system. In addition, the city is now home to many excellent restaurants, including a variety of ethnic establishments. In each of my three previous seminars, the group gathered for dinner at least once a week in a restaurant, and I would hope that this year’s group will do so as well.
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