Studies in the Rhetoric of Fiction

201 Pages·2015·1.935 MB·English

by  Ana-karina Schneider

Studies in the Rhetoric
of Fiction

Studies in the Rhetoric
of Fiction
By
Ana-Karina Schneider
Studies in the Rhetoric of Fiction

By Ana-Karina Schneider

This book first published 2015

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2015 by Ana-Karina Schneider

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-7713-1
ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7713-8
To M & M

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface ........................................................................................................ ix
Acknowledgements ................................................................................. xxii
Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1
London, Time and the Times in English Fiction
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 18
Ian McEwan’s Atonement: A Case of Traumatic Authorship
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 36
Competing Narratives in Julian Barnes’s Arthur & George
Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 45
Julian Barnes’s Fiction: A History of Englishness in 10 ½ Pages
Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 58
“Oh! It Is Only a Novel!”: Apologetic Reading, a Postmodern Avatar
of the Enlightenment
Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 77
How to Read Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled
Chapter Seven ............................................................................................ 87
“The Past Is a Foreign Country”: Regression, Dislocation
and Chronotopical Fluidity in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Novels
Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 109
Clone Narratives and the Control of Discourse in Contemporary Fiction
Chapter Nine ............................................................................................ 121
“Time to Call an End to Romance”: Anti-Romance in the Contemporary
British Novel
viii Table of Contents
Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 143
On Musicality: John Banville’s The Sea and Beethoven’s
“Meeresstille und Glückliche Fahrt”
Conclusions ............................................................................................. 154
Notes ........................................................................................................ 158
Bibliography ............................................................................................ 166
Index ........................................................................................................ 178
PREFACE
This collection of essays investigates the contemporary novel’s relation
to its forerunners, the picaresques, romances and sentimental novels of the
eighteenth century. Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Laurence
Sterne are therefore stable landmarks and reference points; Jane Austen is
postulated as something of a turning point in the development of the genre;
and of the contemporary practitioners, a handful recur from one chapter to
the next, particularly Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro.
Most of the novelists discussed here are British, but the works of Irish
(Anne Enright, John Banville), Canadian (Margaret Atwood, Michael
Ondaatje) and American (Herman Melville, Stacey Richter) writers are
also occasionally referred to in order to shed light on and broaden the
picture of the current state of the genre, as are media and genres other than
the novelistic. The chapters share an interest in the rhetoric of fiction—
broadly understood as the way in which fictional works achieve their
effects on readers, whether by directly addressing a hypothetical reader,
using irony and parody, orchestrating competitions between divergent or
intertwining narratives, inviting intertextual readings or openly taking
issue with traditional conventions and the readers’ expectations. The book
however does not aim to propose a consistent theory of the rhetoric of
fiction; nor does it claim any generalisable validity for its findings. Rather,
it consists of a series of readings that address various aspects of the novels
they focus on, attempting to tease out the subtle means by which texts
work on their readers. Moreover, there is no consistent use of rhetorical
jargon, although some of the terminology does inevitably crop up
whenever distinctions need to be drawn and the more technical aspects of
novels are interrogated.
Like Northrop Frye, Wayne C. Booth, R.S. Crane and other early
rhetoricians, I think of rhetorical persuasion primarily in the sense of the
stylistic devices and narrative strategies deployed by fiction writers to
establish and control the relationship between their subject matters and/or
characters and the reader. I am, in other words, interested in how specific
novels achieve rhetorical effects by playing with the means and
conventions made available to them by the genre. In his 1957 Anatomy of
Criticism, Frye is explicit about the relationship between style and
persuasion: “Rhetoric has from the beginning meant two things: