the feedback loop among authorial agency, textual phenomena, and readerly
response in Faulkner’s novel.
(8) The underlying rhetorical situation varies in different kinds of nar-
rative, and it typically varies within individual narratives. For instance, in
fictional narratives such as Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Third and Final Continent”
or Franz Kafka’s “Das Urteil” (to take two narratives discussed in later chap-
ters), the teller/audience situation is doubled: the narrators tell their stories
to uncharacterized narratees for their own purposes, while the authors com-
municate both the events and the narrators’ telling of them to their audiences
for their own purposes. In such cases, the fictional narrative is a single text
combining at least two tracks of rhetorical communication. I say “at least”
because, as I shall argue in chapter 1, this commonsense description overlooks
other tracks between author and audience commonly constructed via dia-
logue, juxtapositions of narrative segments, and other things. This description
also overlooks the ways in which authors can construct synergistic relation-
ships among these tracks that generate communications that are more than
the sum of the transmissions along the individual tracks. In nonfictional nar-
rative, the same tracks are available for the author’s use, but sometimes the
narrator-narratee track is indistinguishable from the author-audience track.
In other words, sometimes authors of nonfiction speak directly in their own
voices to their projected audiences, as, for example, Joan Didion does in The
Year of Magical Thinking. But this common strategy in nonfiction is not a
required one: authors of nonfiction can distance themselves from their narra-
tors, as, for example, Frank McCourt does in Angela’s Ashes.
(9) The progression of a narrative—its synthesis of textual and readerly
dynamics—is crucial to its effects and purposes. Textual dynamics are the
internal processes by which narratives move from beginning through middle
to ending, and readerly dynamics are the corresponding cognitive, affective,
ethical, and aesthetic responses of the audience to those textual dynamics. The
bridge between textual dynamics and readerly dynamics consists of interpre-
tive, ethical, and aesthetic judgments. These judgments constitute a bridge
because they are encoded in the narrative yet made by rhetorical readers.
Furthermore, by describing progression as a synthesis, I seek to capture the
ways that textual dynamics and readerly dynamics influence each other. I will
develop this point more fully in chapter 2.
Textual dynamics are themselves a synthesis of plot dynamics, govern-
ing the sequence of events, and narratorial dynamics, governing the relations
among authors, tellers (whether narrators or characters), and audiences. Plot
dynamics typically develop through patterns of instability-complication-
resolution. That is, an author generates a plot through introducing one or
10 • INTRODUCTION