James Phelan

Estranging Unreliability, Bonding Unreliability, and the Ethics of Lolita

Can we really be surprised that readers have overlooked Nabokov’s ironies in Lolita, when Humbert Humbert is given full and unlimited control over the rhetorical resources? . . . One of the delights of this delightful, profound book is that of watching Humbert almost make a case for himself. But Nabokov has insured that many, perhaps most, of his readers will be unsuccessful, in that they will identify Humbert with the author more than Nabokov intends. (391) Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, Chapter 13

On Teaching Critical Arguments: A Matrix of Understanding

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

Voice, tone, and the rhetoric of narrative communication

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.

Why There Are No One-to-One Correspondences among Fictionality, Narrative, and Techniques: A Response to Mari Hatavara and Jarmila Mildorf

ABSTRACT:In this essay we respond to Mari Hatavara’s and Jarmila Mildorf ’s critical engagement with our “Ten Theses about Fictionality.” We explain why we find our rhetorical approach to fictionality more persuasive than their approach; more specifically, we explain why we disagree with their claims that fictionality entails narrative and that the presence in a text of techniques conventionally associated with fiction gives that text a hybrid or fictional status. We also explain why we find the large discursive territory covered by our notion of fictionality to be a theoretical advantage rather than disadvantage.

Narrative as Argument in Atul Gawande’s “On Washing Hands” and “Letting Go”

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 piece.