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6 Generic Framing and Authorial Ethos
- University of Nebraska Press
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Part 3 Further Explorations Contracts and Ethos Expectations [3.234.253.152] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 14:27 GMT) 173 Building on the framework developed in the first two parts, part 3 elaborates on two key issues. The first, which has regularly popped up already, is that of the framing function of genre, which is explored in chapter 6. Genres can be considered to raise expectations regarding the point of the literary experience and the work’s rhetorical aims: for instance , to move, convince, and denounce, in the case of engagé literature ; to inform and, often, to testify or denounce, in documentary works; to reflect, in the essay. To the generic expectations also belong anticipation regarding an author’s or narrator’s ethos and about the interpretive and evaluative regimes considered appropriate. A writer also adopts a posture and expresses a conception of literature through the choice of genre. She or he inscribes her- or himself into the “structured space of positions” within the literary field and offers his or her writing for accreditation (Dubois 1992). But just as texts, or their authors, may elicit interpretive uncertainties through conflicting or indeterminate generic clues, they can withhold or contradict an expected ethos, display it deceptively , or multiply conflicting ethos cues. The second issue that is central in part 3 is how readers would assess a narrative voice’s or an author’s sincerity, or rather, its irony. While there is a sense in which sincerity and irony form two sides of the same coin, and each can very well accommodate a dash of the other, I discuss them separately, shedding light on different perspectives that should be fruitful for the analysis of ethos attributions. Both subjects, which are particularly challenging for any analysis of ethos attributions, are developed in chapter 7. Sincerity, as one of irony’s “others,” will be mainly approached from a culture-historical perspective. I draw attention to the various topoi that might signal sincerity but also to the quite diverse connotations and evaluations attached to this kind of ethos. The other section concentrates on forms of irony that are intimately connected to uncertainties about who asserts, and whose point of view or ethos we would construct as being asserted, an uncertainty that is partly inherent to the fictional or literary communication contract. ...