the audience, while the ethics of the told refer to the ethical dimensions of
characters and events, including character-character interactions and choices
to act in one way rather than another by individual characters. In keeping
with the a posteriori principle, I approach ethics from the inside out rather
than the outside in. That is, rather than using a particular theory of ethics to
interpret and evaluate the ethical dimension of narratives, I seek to identify
the system (whether coherent, eclectic, or incoherent) an author has deployed
(consciously or intuitively) in the narrative.
(7) Rhetorical theory integrates history in multiple ways. Because rhe-
torical theory emphasizes author-audience relations and because it views both
as always already situated in historical and social contexts, rhetorical theory is
not just compatible with but dependent on historical knowledge—and histori-
cal analysis—of all kinds: literary, cultural, social, political, and so on. The role
of history in rhetorical analysis is itself governed by a principle of salience:
what historical knowledge is especially significant for the construction of
author-audience relations? To take just a few examples from the following
chapters: In The Friends of Eddie Coyle, George V. Higgins relies on his audi-
ence to know something about both the Black Panthers and how they were
perceived by white law enforcement. In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen relies
on her audience to know about a wide range of social norms of England’s
Regency Period. In “Recitatif,” Toni Morrison relies on her audience to know
about the political controversies surrounding post-1960s school bussing pro-
grams in the United States. In “The Third and Final Continent,” Jhumpa Lahiri
relies on her audience to have some knowledge of the tradition of arranged
marriages in India as well as of recent patterns of Indian immigration to Eng-
land and the United States.
These examples also point to another common—but by no means univer-
sal—aspect of the relation between historical and rhetorical analysis. In each
case, the historical knowledge is a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for
understanding the author-audience relations. To get at sufficient conditions,
the rhetorical analyst does a detailed, close analysis of the multiple factors
that go into establishing that relationship—and, indeed, its trajectory over the
course of a narrative. For the most part, my attention will be directed toward
such analyses, but I remain aware that they are themselves dependent on a
wide range of historical knowledge. One more example, about literary history,
will help clarify this point. In approaching a novel such as The Sound and the
Fur y, a rhetorical reader benefits from knowing something about modern-
ism and that Faulkner was a modernist. At the same time, such knowledge is
only a starting point for the task of accounting for the detailed workings of
PRINCIPLES OF RHETORICAL POETICS • 9