Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative

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Ohio State University Press, 2007 - 249 pagine
In Experiencing Fiction, James Phelan develops a provocative and engaging affirmative answer to the question, "Can we experience narrative fiction in similar ways?" Phelan grounds that answer in two elements of narrative located at the intersection between authorial design and reader response: judgments and progressions. Phelan contends that focusing on the three main kinds of judgment--interpretive, ethical, and aesthetic--and on the principles underlying a narrative's movement from beginning to end reveals the experience of reading fiction to be potentially sharable. In Part One, Phelan skillfully analyzes progressions and judgments in narratives with a high degree of narrativity: Jane Austen's Persuasion, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Edith Wharton's "Roman Fever," and Ian McEwan's Atonement. In Part Two, Phelan turns his attention to the different relationships between judgments and progressions in hybrid forms--in the lyric narratives of Ernest Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," Sandra Cisneros's "Woman Hollering Creek," and Robert Frost's "Home Burial," and in the portrait narratives of Alice Munro's "Prue" and Ann Beattie's "Janus." More generally, Phelan moves back and forth between the exploration of theoretical principles and the detailed work of interpretation. As a result, Experiencing Fiction combines Phelan's fresh and compelling readings of numerous innovative narratives with his fullest articulation of the rhetorical theory of narrative.

Dall'interno del libro

Sommario

Introduction Judgments Progressions and the Rhetorical
1
PART
22
Chapter Three Chicago Criticism New Criticism Cultural Thematics
79
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Informazioni sull'autore (2007)

James Phelan is an Australian writer, born in Melbourne, Australia in 1979. He studied architecture at RMIT, received his MA at the University of Melbourne in Creative Writing, and earned his PhD in Young Adult Literature at Swinburne University of Technology. He writes thrillers and young adult post-apocalyptic novels. His series include The Jed Walker series, The Last Thirteen series, The Lachlan Fox series, and The Alone series. He wrote a book of nonfiction entitled Literati.

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