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238Rocky Mountain Review F. R. ANKERSMIT. Narrative Logic; a Semantic Analysis of the Historian's Language. The Hague/London: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983. 265 p. It may seem unusual for a literary journal to be reviewing a theoretical work in historiography. However, the phenomenal rise of interest among literary scholars in dealing with issues that transcend a narrow definition of literature requires that we pay attention to at least that sector of historiographie theory dealing with the nature of the narrated text. One thinks immediately of the seminal writings of Hayden White, where the vocabulary of rhetorical analysis underpins an elaborate investigation into the modalities or styles of historical writing. Even more, the rhetorically defined tropes have to do with the conception of event itself, such that historical writing is a second-level activity that expresses, in terms of verbal discourse, a text that has already been formulated as a cognitive activity. This is an interest that underscores on the ooe hand the parameters of apophantic discourse and narrativity, in rhetoric as a taxonomy of linguistic resources that configure discourse, in the essential schemata or plot possibilities of narrational expression. On the other hand, there is the need for contemporary literary scholarship to deal with writing on the margins of the established canon, to explore the continuities between literary and so-called nonliterary works, to expand the scope of literary studies to include a wide variety of written texts other than tbe strictly literary, as well as cultural texts in general which may not necessarily be written or written only in part. The interest in autobiography, diaries, sociopolitical tracts, documentary writing, popular culture, and even something as traditional as drama (but as theater event rather than just literary text) has required attention, to the whole area of discourse analysis which is not specifically literary. A natural continuity of this broader interest in the questions of text production involves research like Ankersmit's. Scholars of Third-World writing and ethnic/minority studies have understood this need more quickly and enthusiastically than have the bastions of conservative departments, or at least Robert Scholes" manifesto would argue, Ankersmit's monograph is very clearly within the context of historical writing as a form of text production, metaphoric and complexly rhetorical, rather than as the interpretive recording ofpréexistent real events. Thus, he brings to bear the extensive spectrum of research in text analysis in the defense of an antipsychologistical and antinarrative realism position in favor of a coherent representation of narration as the immediate textual substance of historical writing. DAVID WILLIAM FOSTER Arizona State University G. DOUGLAS ATKINS and MICHAEL L. JOHNSON, eds. Writing andReading Differently: Deconstruction and the Teaching ofComposition and Literature. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985. 216 p. The editors ofthis fascinating volume state that it is "a book about relations: between writing and reading,, literature and composition, and the teaching of the one and tbe other" (vii). Deconstruction, they say, points to the relations rather than the differences between reading and writing, and has enormous practical value in the classroom. Tbe first, assertion is amply illustrated in the essays, but the second, as composition teachers are wont to say, needs more specific examples. ...

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