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  • A Rhetorical Poetics of Nonfiction, with Small Stitches:A Response to James Phelan's Target Essay
  • Markku Lehtimäki (bio)

In his insightful essay "Authors, Resources, Audiences: Toward a Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative" James Phelan convincingly argues for a rhetorical theory of narrative which "provides greater explanatory power for some significant aspects of narrative" than "approaches that conceive of narrative primarily as a structure of meanings" (2). Phelan's continually progressing project remains worthwhile among other recent versions of narrative theory, whether cognitive, cultural, sociological, or philosophical. Its specific power resides in its solid emphasis on authorial agency and audience response, and this emphasis makes the approach an honestly human and experiential one among various theories about textual structures and mechanical thought experiments.

In this response to Phelan's essay, my principal aim is to consider his author–resources–audience (ARA) chart in relation to author–text–reader communication taking place in nonfictional narrative. Since, according to Phelan, "the rhetorical model cannot be diagrammed in two dimensions" (7) in the clear and linear style of classical narratology's communication model, the rhetorical model (as I would like to see it) welcomes the lifelike complexity, open-endedness, and imperfection of nonfictional narratives. I will more or less discuss each part of this communicative chart: first the author or the implied author, second resources or nonfiction's poetic and textual means, and third audience response together with ethical consequences of telling about one's life or another person's life.

As mentioned earlier, what distinguishes the rhetorical theory of narrative from many other narrative theories, including classical and cognitive, is its way of foregrounding authors (both actual and implied) and audiences (actual, authorial, and narrative). One of Phelan's most persuasive points in his target essay is his defense of the authorial agent; he writes that "theorists who want to reject the implied author but retain the author as the constructor [End Page 133] of the text have far more in common with rhetorical theorists than those who want to reject the implied author because they believe meanings arise primarily out of text-audience interactions" (9). Yet Phelan—like his predecessors in the rhetorical tradition such as Wayne C. Booth and Seymour Chatman—wants to retain the concept of the implied author also in the case of nonfiction. One of Phelan's textual examples in his essay (and the one I will discuss in my response) is David Small's autobiographical graphic novel Stitches, in which Small is a drawn character in the "comic book" story and an implied author of this text, yet less complex than the physical human being with his nonliterary everyday activities. In the case of Stitches, the implied author is indeed a "streamlined" version of the actual author (Phelan, Living, "Authors"), a kind of picture or metonymy, and a smaller version of Small.

I basically agree with Phelan's core theory, but I find that narrative theory still needs a detailed discussion of those resources—such as free indirect discourse (FID), voice, style, space, temporality, intertextuality, and so on—that, according to Phelan, "the teller can deploy in order to connect with the audience" (7). While the rhetorical theory's power is in its focus on authors and audiences, these precise rhetorical resources also need to be at the center of any sophisticated narrative analysis—and I am not saying that they are not present in Phelan's fine essay. But I think the essay should say even more about those resources and their role in the rhetorical theory of narrative. This is also reflected on by Phelan himself in the closing of his essay:

Since I have focused in this essay on the payoffs of attending to the shaping power of both authors and audiences for narrative construction, I want to close by saying a little more about resources … Rhetorical poetics remains as interested in these resources as any other approach to narrative [but it] consistently subordinates its claims about the nature of any element to its concern with how somebody uses that element in the service of accomplishing some purpose(s) in relation to somebody else.

(32)

I believe Phelan's avid readers would like...

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