and audiences in narrative construction and communication. Thus, I want
Somebody Telling Somebody Else to be shorthand for “somebody using the
resources of narrative in order to accomplish certain purposes in relation to
certain audiences.”
Underlying this shorthand are the two key principles of rhetorical theory.
The first I have already sketched: narrative is ultimately not a structure but
an action, a teller using resources of narrative to achieve a purpose in rela-
tion to an audience. The second both complements and complicates the first:
the presence and the activity of the somebody else in the narrative action is
integral to its shape. In other words, the audience does not just react to the
teller’s communication; instead the audience and its unfolding responses sig-
nificantly influence how the teller constructs the tale. The two principles also
indicate why I label my project “rhetorical poetics.” Like Aristotle and others
committed to a poetics, I want to explain the nature of the elements of nar-
rative—what I call resources. Again like Aristotle and others, I also want to
explain the interrelations of these resources, and, more broadly, their func-
tions. In order to do that, however, I have concluded that I need to nest my
concern with poetics inside a rhetoric. In other words, I have become per-
suaded that the most compelling way to explain the nature, interrelations, and
functions of narrative resources is by viewing them within the broader context
of author-audience relationships. As I make the more detailed case for rhe-
torical poetics in this book, I hope to show that it offers (a) an understanding
of narrative that provides distinctive and valuable insights into the mode and
(b) sometimes greater explanatory power than other conceptions, especially
those that are text-based and tied, implicitly or explicitly, to one degree or
another, to structuralist narratology’s view of narrative as a synthesis of story
and discourse.
Just as I was tempted by a different title, I also contemplated a different
subtitle: Exercises in Rhetorical Reading appealed to me not just as a descrip-
tion applicable to the individual chapters but also as a way of emphasizing my
abiding interest in the acts of reading and of interpretation. To a large degree,
the act of reading functions as both the ground and the test of rhetorical
theory. In other words, it is (a) the basis for most of the paradigm’s theoreti-
cal constructs (for example, the distinction between bonding and estranging
unreliability, which I elaborate in chapter 5, seeks to capture differences in the
readerly effects of the same technique) and (b) the standard against which the
utility of such constructs can be measured (e.g., how well does the construct
help capture one or more salient aspects of the reading experience?). In this
way, the project of rhetorical poetics works inductively more than deductively
by privileging narrative practice as the source of its theoretical constructs.
x • PREFACE