Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration by James Phelan

Reading Rhetorically: Discussing the Ethics of Narrative Form

“…Foiled by his family from making his way to the market before it closes, the story ends with the narrator confronting his own vanity as night sets on the bazaar. The narrative of "Araby" is a form of "character narration" (Phelan, 2005), where the teller is himself a dramatized character in the story (classic examples include Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird and Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby). Phelan (2001) described character narration as simultaneously proceeding on two tracks: the "narratornarratee track" (p. 213), where the narrator in the narrative situation (perhaps unknown to us) tells their tale to the recipient (perhaps unknown to us or the narrator), and the "narrator-authorial audience track" (p. 213), where the narrator unwittingly provides key information to the reader (who the narrator theoretically does not know exists).…”

Narratives of Ageing, Narratives of Nation-building: Manjul and the Poetics of Dissidence in Nepal

“…While sociological discourses on ageing have centred on aspects such as identity, stratification, life cycle rituals and caregiving (Cohen 1998;Kitwood and Bredin 1992;Lamb 2000), occasionally adopting an auto-ethnographic approach (Bateson 1974), studies in literature have concentrated on the thematic elements of narratives and their creation (Raja 2004(Raja , 2010. What Ira Raja called a 'narrative turn' could potentially uncover sociological dimensions of biological ageing, to the extent that the maturation of a character within fiction or poetry might symbolise a nation coming of age (Phelan 2005;Randall and Kenyon 2004;Brennan 1989). The narrative turn is cautious about lending the framework of ageing to write disruptions to conventional linearity.…”

The Pragmatics of Disagreement on Screen: Faulty Interactions? Yasmina Reza and Roman Polanski’s 2011 Carnage as a Case Study

“…The whole film production team, which she calls "the collective sender", are aware of the recipients, the viewers, and "convey meanings especially for their benefit" (50). As several scholars have argued indeed, whenever there is a conversation between characters, whether in the context of drama (Short 1995, 146) or narration (Phelan 2005(Phelan , 2017, there are (at least) two communication channels indeed: the charactercharacter channel and the author (or collective sender in our case)-charactercharacter-audience, which relies on the phenomenon of indirection (Phelan 2017;Sell et al 2013). When the collective sender plans for a character to disagree with another character on screen, it does not mean, obviously, that the collective sender disagrees with the audience, or that the character voicing his or her disagreement disagrees with the audience either.…”