INTRODUCTION
Constructing a Rhetorical Poetics
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N KEEPING with this book’s focus on “somebody telling somebody else,”
I choose in the following chapters to examine resources of narrative that
help unpack the multifarious relationships among those three terms. Just as
chapter 1 gave primary attention to the somebody and chapter 2 to the some-
body else, these chapters give primary attention to resources—and how they’re
deployed by particular tellers in relation to particular audiences. Here I offer
just a brief sketch of the logic governing the sequence of my theory construc-
tion. It is, to a large degree, a chain-link logic: theoretical issues in one chap-
ter get looped into issues in the next, even as all those issues are explored in
relation to particular narratives. Partially because of this interest in rhetorical
reading, I do not construct all the links as symmetrical, and, indeed, some are
both larger and thicker than others. My ultimate goal is to construct a com-
prehensive rhetorical poetics, but since that goal is not attainable in a single
book, my secondary goal is to indicate what such a poetics would look like
through detailed development of some parts of it and illustrative sketches of
others.
More specifically, I begin the chain-link process of theory construction in
chapter 3 by extending the discussion of probability in chapter 2, but I also
shift the focus to how authors’ and audiences’ shared assumptions about fic-
tion and nonfiction influence authors’ handlings of and audiences’ responses
to plotting and probability. My test cases are Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice