Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative

James Phelan

When we first begin reading narratives (or have them read to us), we learn both that they typically have good guys (or gals), e.g., Cinderella and the Prince, and bad guys (or gals), e.g., Cinderella’s stepmother and her stepsisters, and that the narrative itself signals which characters are which. In one version of “Cinderella,” for example, the narrator tells us on the first page that Cinderella is a young woman “of unparalleled goodness and sweetness of temper, which she took from her mother, who was the best creature in the world” and that her stepmother is “the proudest and most haughty woman who ever lived.” To put the effects of the narrator’s comments in the terms that David Hare uses in the first epigraph, we become engaged on the side of Cinderella before the narrative introduces the nature of the conflict implicit in this contrasting description (and in our understanding that we are reading a fairy tale).

جهت استعلام قيمت و سفارش چاپ اين محصول لطفا با انتشارات گنج حضور تماس حاصل فرماييد.