down their different postclassical paths, exploring the questions accompany-
ing their particular approaches, their answers typically complement and com-
plicate rather than replace the paradigmatic vision of narrative engendered by
the story/discourse distinction: narrative is a structured sign system. In this
respect, postclassical narratology has significantly revised but not fundamen-
tally altered the paradigm of classical narratology.
With these observations in mind, I add two others: (1) The last fifty years
of narrative theory, encompassing the classical and postclassical periods, have
been enormously productive, generating major theoretical breakthroughs, sev-
eral highly effective approaches, and countless insightful analyses of individ-
ual narratives. (2) Nevertheless, there are significant phenomena of narrative
and its workings that the field has not yet adequately accounted for. I propose
to make the case for the value of a rhetorical paradigm by demonstrating (a)
that it can provide compelling accounts of those phenomena and (b) that the
principles underlying those accounts have significant consequences for the
way in which we think of other phenomena and narrative more generally.
In part 1, I begin to take up this challenge by zeroing in on two narrative
phenomena that have so far been under-theorized. The first phenomenon, the
focus of chapter 1, is a common feature of narrative texts that has been hid-
ing in plain sight: character-character dialogue. The second phenomenon, the
focus of chapter 2, is what Aristotle called probable impossibilities and what
I will what I call crossover phenomena in narrative progressions, instances in
which the logic of author-audience relationships trumps the logic of event
sequence or of telling situations. In each chapter, I shall link the discussion
of the phenomena to larger conclusions about the efficacy of the rhetorical
paradigm.
In part 2, I shall thicken the description of this rhetorical paradigm and its
consequences by means of multiple exercises in what Peter J. Rabinowitz and
I have called theory-practice, that is, inquiries in which theory aids the work
of interpretation even as that work allows for further developments in theory.
These exercises address a range of issues, from probability to ambiguity, from
unreliable and deficient narration to reliable narration, from character-char-
acter dialogue to occasions of narration. I discuss the logic underlying the
arrangement of these exercises in the brief preface to part 2.
Before I launch into the exploration of character-character dialogue, I
offer a sketch of ten key principles of the rhetorical paradigm that I and others
working in the tradition have developed in previous work. I have expressed
some of these points above, but I hope the advantages of putting them all in
one place will outweigh the disadvantages of some redundant telling. This
sketch seeks to be succinct in its explication, in part because the rest of the
4 • INTRODUCTION