Richard Walsh's paper persuasively argues that fiction supports the communicative, rhetorical function of literature. Fictional plots and characters do indeed help us see the ways of the world and formulate value judgments about particular matters as well as about human condition in general. Epics, novels, plays, and movies tell stories that do not fully belong to the real world that surrounds us in order to make readers and spectators realize that human existence is not exactly what they thought it to be and, at the same time, recognize and better understand things they always silently sensed to be the case. When we attend a performance of Shakespeare's The Tempest or read the play, Prospero's unheard-of magic powers astound us and, at the same time, invite us to sense how deeply usurpation and exile hurt their victims. As readers and spectators, therefore, we neither trust fully nor entirely mistrust fictional stories....
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Research Article|
December 01 2019
The Links between Fiction and Rhetoric
Thomas Pavel
Thomas Pavel
University of Chicago
THOMAS PAVEL, born in Romania, earned his PhD at the University of Paris-3. He teaches in the Departments of Romance Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. Earlier he taught at Princeton University, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and at the University of Québec in Montréal. He is the author of The Poetics of Plot (1985), Fictional Worlds (1986), The Spell of Language (2002), and The Lives of the Novel (2015). (tpavel@uchicago.edu)
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Style (2019) 53 (4): 430–433.
Citation
Thomas Pavel; The Links between Fiction and Rhetoric. Style 1 December 2019; 53 (4): 430–433. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/style.53.4.0430
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