Approaching Variation
Between Readers and Reception
KEYNOTE ADDRESS
The 2017 Anne P. Kahana Memorial Lecture will be delivered by
James Phelan
Ohio State University
“Somebody Telling Somebody Else:
The Rhetorical Power of Audiences”
This talk revisits the rhetorical definition of narrative—somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purposes that something happened—by homing in on the agency of the somebody else. More specifically, it highlights the importance of an audience’s unfolding responses to a narrative’s progression and contends that those responses often become a force that shapes a narrative’s construction. This view of the rhetorical power of audiences leads to a new understanding of Aristotle’s famous—and surprising—dictum that “the poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities,” and of the nature of narrative probability more generally.
Indeed, this view helps explain why readers often happily overlook an author’s clear deviations from his or her narrative’s dominant cause-and-effect logic of character and events, as a close look at three cases, chosen from both antiquity and the contemporary period, demonstrates. These cases are Homer’s depiction of Achilles’s pursuit of Hector in book 22 of the Iliad (Aristotle’s example of a “justified error”), Jhumpa Lahiri’s representation of a key character’s laughter in “The Third and Final Continent” and David Small’s handling of a crucial revelation in his graphic memoir Stitches. These cases are especially significant because they demonstrate that authors across the ages rely so heavily on the rhetorical power of their audiences’ developing responses that they confidently choose to deviate from their dominant schemes of probability at climactic moments in their narratives. Furthermore, these cases are not outliers but rather exemplars of how narrative not only creates but deeply depends on inextricable connections between the somebodies who tell and the somebody else's who listen and respond.
about the Anne P. Kahana Memorial Lecture
The annual keynote address at the Stony Brook English Graduate Conference is supported by the Anne P. Kahana Memorial Fund. Pat Kahana was an outstanding Ph.D. student in the English Department at Stony Brook whose dissertation, Illness, Health, and the Romantic Subject: An Intergeneric Study was published, and her degree awarded, after her untimely death in 1991.
A fund in Pat's memory was announced after her passing:
"The Kahana Lecture will commemorate Pat's extraordinary efforts in leading the 1990 Conference as well as the many other ways her energy, dedication, and compassion enhanced the English Department and Stony Brook communities."