about the events as having actually occurred. In other words, the actual author
constructs an implied author who unknowingly presents fabrications as facts,
and the authorial audience takes them as such—and so too do those rhetori-
cal readers who join the authorial audience. Once the hoax is exposed, rhe-
torical readers (and indeed, many other members of the actual audience) feel
justifiably betrayed by the actual author’s deceptions. Indeed, that negative
ethical judgment is part of the rhetorical reader’s step-two evaluation of the
act of reading. But there is typically another group of readers who say that the
deceptions don’t matter much to them because they still value their reading
experience. Such readers are typically responding to their relationship with
the implied rather than the actual author.
(4) With audience, I break symmetry and don’t include a slash between
the authorial and actual readers for two reasons: (a) The difference is clear:
while some theorists, such as David Herman (Narrative Theory 2012), find
fault with the concept of an authorial audience, no one argues about its mean-
ing; (b) The difference has a significant payoff in explaining how narrative
communication works (or doesn’t work) from a rhetorical perspective. The
case of hoax memoirs is again a good example. But a more common situation
also supports the point. As individual readers, we often find ourselves missing
things in the authorial communication that we recognize (either while reading
or in later conversation with other readers) that we are supposed to get. What
we’re experiencing on these occasions is the gap between the authorial and the
actual audience—and we’re also glimpsing the difficulty of being a successful
rhetorical reader. See also number 6.
(5) I also locate the actual and authorial audiences together in the same
column rather than putting the authorial audience in the resources column
alongside the narratee and narrative audience for two reasons: (a) to empha-
size the difference between text-specific devices employed by the author in
the larger communication (narrative audience and narratee) and the autho-
rial and actual audiences as the ultimate recipients of that larger communi-
cation and (b) to highlight the close relationship between the authorial and
actual audiences in rhetorical reading—and thus, my use of the term rhetori-
cal readers to identify those members of the actual audience focused on enter-
ing the authorial audience. As I noted in chapter 1, authorial audiences are
typically a combination of an author’s hypotheses about actual audiences and
the author’s decisions (conscious or intuitive) about the qualities she or he
wants the audience to have. Actual rhetorical readers may have more or less
difficulty in joining the authorial audience, but by definition, they want to.
(6) I also highlight the actual audience as a key constant in order to
emphasize the point that the implied author’s purpose in telling is to affect
AUTHORS, RESOURCES, AUDIENCES • 27