Furthermore, the project of rhetorical poetics views interpretation—and espe-
cially the understanding of author-audience relations in individual texts—as
a fundamental raison d’etre. In that respect, the project stakes its claim to be
worthwhile on its capacity to help users have richer encounters with narra-
tive texts.
At the same time, however, my inquiries into individual narratives also
aim for more general conclusions applicable to other narratives. Rhetorical
reading informs rhetorical poetics and vice versa. In this way, rhetorical poet-
ics wants its findings to be portable. To put this point another way, rhetori-
cal poetics seeks to establish two-way traffic between practical inquiries into
individual narratives and theoretical inquiries into (various dimensions of )
author-audience relationships and/or the resources of narrative. The commit-
ment to this methodology goes along with the principle that the project of
rhetorical poetics is unlikely ever to be finished, since new theoretical con-
clusions typically generate new interpretive inquiries and these inquiries can
lead to further extension or revision of the theory. Similarly, new narratives
(or older narratives seen through new rhetorical lenses) can generate their
own fresh lines of two-way traffic. For all these reasons, I regard A Rhetorical
Poetics of Narrative as a perpetual work-in-progress.
Finally, both title and subtitle point toward the concerns of the individual
chapters. I focus in them on (a) tellers: authors, narrators (especially charac-
ter narrators), and characters in their dialogue with each other (a group who
have been relatively neglected by narrative theory); (b) audiences: primarily
authorial but in some chapters actual audiences as well; and (c) how the rela-
tions among tellers and audiences interact with other resources, including
progressions, probability, ambiguity, and occasions, to create multiple effects
that themselves ripple throughout a narrative.
In some of my previous work, I have not only staged extended engage-
ments with other approaches but gave those engagements a prominent place
in the development of my arguments. Indeed, in my first book, Worlds from
Wo r d s (1981), I structured my whole inquiry into the role of language in fic-
tion around my investigations into alternative theories about that role. In this
book, I have subordinated engagements with others to the purpose of explain-
ing the key principles and demonstrating the interpretive consequences of
rhetorical poetics. Because I am a pluralist, I am not interested in arguing that
rhetorical poetics is the most important or most powerful project in contem-
porary narrative theory. Indeed, if everyone became a rhetorical theorist, I
would be unhappy because that would impoverish the field. In practical terms,
my pluralism and my focus on rhetorical poetics mean that I take up the
relation between my approach and others as that relation becomes especially
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