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Narrative theory has always been centrally concerned with fiction, yet it has tended to treat fictions as if they were merely the framed or disowned equivalents of nonfictional narratives. A rhetorical perspective upon fictionality, however, sees it as a direct way of meaning and a distinct kind of communicative gesture. The Rhetoric of Fictionality : Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction by Richard Walsh argues the merit of such a perspective and demonstrates its radical implications for narrative theory. A new conception of fictionality as a distinctive rhetorical resource, somewhat like the master-trope of fictional narrative, cuts across many of the core theoretical issues in the field. The model, set out in chapter one, is subsequently tested and elaborated in relation to currently prevalent assumptions about narrativity and mimesis ; narrative structure ; the narrator and transmission ; voice and mediacy ; narrative media and cognition ; and creativity, reception, and involvement. Throughout, the theoretical analysis seeks to vindicate readers' intuitions about fiction without merely restating them : the result is a forceful challenge to many of narrative theory's orthodoxies. The rhetorical model of fictionality advanced in this book offers up new areas of inquiry into the purchase of fictiveness itself upon questions of narrative interpretation. It urges a fundamental reconception of the apparatus of narrative theory by theorizing the conditions of significance that make fictions conceivable and worthwhile.
The first edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction transformed the criticism of fiction and soon became a classic in the field. One of the most widely used texts in fiction courses, it is a standard reference point in advanced discussions of how fictional form works, how authors make novels accessible, and how readers recreate texts, and its concepts and terms—such as "the implied author," "the postulated reader," and "the unreliable narrator"—have become part of the standard critical lexicon. For this new edition, Wayne C. Booth has written an extensive Afterword in which he clarifies misunderstandings, corrects what he now views as errors, and sets forth his own recent thinking about the rhetoric of fiction. The other new feature is a Supplementary Bibliography, prepared by James Phelan in consultation with the author, which lists the important critical works of the past twenty years—two decades that Booth describes as "the richest in the history of the subject."
"Narrative theory has always been centrally concerned with fiction, yet it has tended to treat fictions as if they were merely the framed or disowned equivalents of nonfictional narratives. A rhetorical perspective upon fictionality, however, sees it as a direct way of meaning and a distinct kind of communicative gesture. The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction by Richard Walsh argues the merit of such a perspective and demonstrates its radical implications for narrative theory. ... The rhetorical model of fictionality advanced in this book offers up new areas of inquiry into the purchase of fictiveness itself upon questions of narrative interpretation. It urges a fundamental reconception of the apparatus of narrative theory by theorizing the conditions of significance that make fictions conceivable and worthwhile."--Besedilo s platnic.
The rhetorical theory of narrative that emerges from these investigations emphasizes the recursive relationships between authorial agency, textual 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 toward predictions about the relationships between techniques, ethics, and ideologies and more toward developing some principles and concepts that allow us to recognize the complex diversity of narrative art.
"Rhetoric is the author's term for the means by which the writer makes known his vision to the reader and persuades him of its validity; and he demonstrates convincingly that there is no essential difference between ostentatiously rhetorical novelists like Fielding and Dickens, and the admired masters of impersonality--Flaubert, James, Joyce ... this is a major critical work which should be required reading for everyone concerned in the academic study of prose fiction." [Modern Language Review].
Perhaps no other critical label has been made to cover more ground than "irony," and in our time irony has come to have so many meanings that by itself it means almost nothing. In this work, Wayne C. Booth cuts through the resulting confusions by analyzing how we manage to share quite specific ironies—and why we often fail when we try to do so. How does a reader or listener recognize the kind of statement which requires him to reject its "clear" and "obvious" meaning? And how does any reader know where to stop, once he has embarked on the hazardous and exhilarating path of rejecting "what the words say" and reconstructing "what the author means"? In the first and longer part of his work, Booth deals with the workings of what he calls "stable irony," irony with a clear rhetorical intent. He then turns to intended instabilities—ironies that resist interpretation and finally lead to the "infinite absolute negativities" that have obsessed criticism since the Romantic period. Professor Booth is always ironically aware that no one can fathom the unfathomable. But by looking closely at unstable ironists like Samuel Becket, he shows that at least some of our commonplaces about meaninglessness require revision. Finally, he explores—with the help of Plato—the wry paradoxes that threaten any uncompromising assertion that all assertion can be undermined by the spirit of irony.
This 1981 book is a study of wide range of fiction, from short stories to tales of horror, from fairy-tales and romances to science fiction, to which the rather loose term 'fantastic' has been applied. Cutting across this wide field, Professor Brooke-Rose examines in a clear and precise way the essential differences between these types of narrative against the background of realistic fiction. In doing so, she employs many of the methods of modern literary theory from Russian formalism to structuralism, while at the same time bringing to these approaches a sharp critical intuition and sound common sense of her own. The range of texts considered is broad: from Poe and James to Tolkien; from Flann O'Brien to the American postmodernism. This book should prove a source of stimulation to all teachers and students of modern literary theory and genre, as well as those interested in 'fantastic' literature.