Digital Rhetoric
James P. Zappen
Foundations of Narrative Theory
A. Rhetoric and Narrative Theory
1. History and Fiction as Human Time. "Our investigation of the
interweavings of history and fiction will lead us beyond the simple
dichotomy, and even the convergence, between the power of history and
that of fiction to refigure time, that is, it will bring us to the
heart of the problem that . . . I designated by the
phrase 'interwoven reference' of history and
fiction . . . . To reach this final problematic, we
must enlarge the space of reading to include everything written,
historiography as well as literature. A general theory of effects will
be the result, one that will allow us to follow to its ultimate stage
of concretization the work of refiguring praxis through narrative,
taken in its broadest sense. The problem will then be to show how the
refiguration of time by history and fiction becomes concrete thanks to
the borrowings each mode of narrative makes from the other mode. These
borrowings will lie in the fact that historical intentionality only
becomes effective by incorporating into its intended object the
resources of fictionalization stemming from the narrative form of
imagination, while the intentionality of fiction produces its effects
of detecting and transforming acting and suffering only by
symmetrically assuming the resources of historicization presented it by
attempts to reconstruct the actual past. From these intimate exchanges
between the historicization of the fictional narrative and the
fictionalization of the historical narrative is born what we call human
time." (101-2)
2. Historical, Lived, and Universal Time. "History initially reveals
its creative capacity as regards the refiguration of time through its
invention and use of certain reflective instruments such as the
calendar; the idea of the succession of generations—and,
connected to this, the idea of the threefold realm of contemporaries,
predecessors, and successors; finally, and above all, in its recourse
to archives, documents, and traces. These reflective instruments are
noteworthy in that they play the role of connectors between lived time
and universal time." (104)
3. Historical Time and Fictive Time. "The most visible but not
necessarily the most decisive feature in the opposition between fictive
time and historical time is the emancipation of the narrator—whom
we are not confusing with the author—with respect to the major
obligation imposed on the historian, namely, the need to conform to the
specific connectors acting to reinscribe lived time upon cosmic
time . . . .
We find a basic indication of the way in which the
fictive experience of time relates in its own way lived temporality and
time perceived as a dimension of the world in the fact that the epic,
the drama, and the novel never fail to mix together historical
characters, dated or datable events, and known geographical sites with
invented characters, events, and places . . . .
Nevertheless, we would be sorely mistaken if we were
to conclude that these dated or datable events draw the time of fiction
into the gravitational field of historical time. What occurs is just
the opposite. From the mere fact that the narrator and the leading
characters are fictional all references to real historical events are
divested of their function of standing for the historical past and are
set of a par with the unreal status of the other events." (127-29)
4. History as Standing For. "We have already made a first break with
this manner of posing the problem by questioning the concept of
'reality' that is applied to the past. To say that a given event
reported by a historian was observable by witnesses in the past solves
nothing. The enigma of pastness is simply shifted from the event
reported to the testimony that reports it. Having-been poses a problem
in the very fact that it is not observable, whether it be a question of
the having-been of events or the having-been of testimony. The pastness
of an observation in the past is not itself observable but it is
memorable. To resolve this enigma, I elaborated the concept of
standing-for or taking-the-place-of, signifying by this that the
constructions of history are intended to be reconstructions." (157)
5. Fiction as the Mediation of Reading. "The parallel between the
function of standing-for belonging to knowledge of the past and the
corresponding function of fiction thus reveals its secret only at the
price of a revision of the concept of unreality, a revision just as
drastic as the one I made in the concept of the reality of the
past . . . .
Indeed, it is only through the mediation of reading
that the literary work attains complete significance, which would be to
fiction what standing-for is to history." (158)
6. Rhetoric, Poetics, Aesthetics. "To what discipline does a theory of
reading belong? To poetics? Yes, insofar as the composition of the work
governs its reading; no, insofar as other factors enter into play,
factors that concern the sort of communication that finds its starting
point in the author, crosses through the work, and finds its end-point
in the reader. For it is, indeed, from the author that the strategy of
persuasion that has the reader as its target starts out. And it is to
this strategy of persuasion that the reader replies by accompanying the
configuration and in appropriating the world proposed by the text.
Three moments need to be considered then, to which
correspond three neighboring, yet distinct, disciplines: (1) the
strategy as concocted by the author and directed toward the reader
[rhetoric]; (2) the inscription of this strategy within a literary
configuration [poetics]; and (3) the response of the reader considered
either as a reading subject or as the receiving public [aesthetics]."
(159-60)
7. The Author as Implied Author. "At the first stage of our itinerary,
we are considering a strategy from the point of view of the author who
carries it through. The theory of reading then falls within the field
of rhetoric, inasmuch as rhetoric governs the art by means of which
orators aim at persuading their listeners . . . .
An objection, however, immediately comes to mind: in bringing the
author back into the field of literary theory, are we not denying the
thesis of the semantic autonomy of the text, and are we not slipping
back into an outmoded psychological analysis of the written text? By no
means. First, the thesis of the semantic autonomy of the text holds
only for a structural analysis that brackets the strategy of persuasion
running through the operations belonging to a poetics as such; removing
these brackets necessarily involves taking into account the one who
concocts the strategy of persuasion, namely, the author. Next, rhetoric
can escape the objection of falling back into the 'intentional fallacy'
and, more generally, of being no more than a psychology of the author
inasmuch as what it emphasizes is not the alleged creation process of
the work but the techniques by means of which a work is made
communicable. These techniques can be discerned in the work itself. The
result is that the only type of author whose authority is in question
here is not the real author, the object of biography, but the implied
author. It is this implied author who takes the initiative in the show
of strength underlying the relation between writing and reading." (160)
8. The Text as an Appropriation of the Reader. "The image of a combat
between a reader and an unreliable narrator, with which we concluded
the preceding discussion, might easily lead us to believe that reading
is added onto the text as a complement it can do without. After all,
libraries are full of unread books, whose configuration is,
nonetheless, well laid out and yet they refigure nothing at all. Our
earlier analyses should suffice to dispell this illusion. Without the
reader who accompanies it, there is no configuring act at work in the
text; and without a reader to appropriate it, there is no world
unfolded before the text." (164)
9. The Reader as Individual and as Public. "From a purely rhetorical
perspective, the reader is, finally, the prey and the victim of the
strategy worked out by the implied author, and is so to the very extent
this strategy is more deeply concealed. Another theory of reading is
required, one that places an emphasis on the reader's
response—the reader's response to the strategems of the implied
author. A new element enriching poetics arises here out of an
'aesthetic' rather than a 'rhetoric,' if we restore to the term
'aesthetic' the full range of meaning of the Greek word
aisthēsis, and if we grant to it the task of exploring the
multiple ways in which a work, in acting on a reader, affects
that reader . . . .
On the one hand, it is through the individual process
of reading that the text reveals its 'structure of appeal'; on the
other hand, it is inasmuch as readers participate in the sedimented
expectations of the general reading public that they are constituted as
competent readers. The act of reading thus becomes one link in the
chain of the history of the reception of a work by the public. Literary
history, renovated by the aesthetic of reception, may thus claim to
include the phenomenology of the act of reading." (166-67)
10. The Dialectics of Reading. "Those features that characterize the
reader's response, or even retort, to the rhetoric of
persuasion . . . stress the dialectical character
of the act of reading and lead us to speak of the work of reading in
the same way we speak of the dream-work. Reading works on the text
thanks to these dialectical features.
First, the act of reading tends to become, with the
modern novel, a response to the strategy of deception so well
illustrated by [James] Joyce's
Ulysses . . . .
The first dialectic, by which reading comes close to
being a battle, gives rise to a second one. What the work of reading
reveals is not only a lack of determinacy but also an excess of
meaning. Every text, even a systematically fragmentary one, is revealed
to be inexhaustible in terms of reading, as though, through its
unavoidably selective character, reading revealed an unwritten aspect
in the text . . . .
A third dialectic takes shape on the horizon of this
search for coherence. If it is too successful, the unfamiliar becomes
familiar, and readers, feeling themselves to be on an equal footing
with the work, come to believe in it so completely they lose themselves
in it. Concretizing then becomes an illusion in the sense of believing
that one actually sees something. If the search for coherence fails,
however, what is foreign remains foreign, and the reader remains on the
doorstep of the work. The 'right' reading is, therefore, the one that
admits a certain degree of illusion-another name for the "willing
suspension of disbelief" called for by Coleridge—and at the same
time accepts the negation resulting from the work's surplus of meaning,
its polysemanticism, which negates all the reader's attempts to adhere
to the text and to its instructions." (168-69)
11. The Horizon of Expectations. "The basic thesis from which all the
others are derived holds that the meaning of a literary work rests upon
the dialogical (dialogisch) relation established between the
work and its public in each age . . . . In this
way, we understand the sense of parody in Don Quixote only if we
are capable of reconstructing its initial public's feeling of
familiarity with chivalrous romances and, consequently, if we are
capable of understanding the shock produced by a work that, after
feigning to satisfy the public's expectation, runs directly counter to
it. The case of new works is in this respect the most favorable for
discerning the change of horizon that constitutes the major effect that
occurs here. Hence the critical factor for establishing a literary
history is the identification of successive aesthetic distances between
the preexisting horizon of expectation and the new work, distances that
mark out the work's reception." (171-72)
12. The Fusion of Horizons. "The ideal type of reading, figured by the
fusion but not confusion of the horizons of expectation of the text and
those of the reader, unites these two moments of refiguration in the
fragile unity of stasis and impetus. This fragile union can be
expressed in the following paradox: the more readers become unreal in
their reading, the more profound and far-reaching will be the work's
influence on social reality. Is it not the least figurative style of
painting that has the greatest chance of changing our vision of the
world?
From this final dialectic comes the result that, if
the problem of the refiguration of time by narrative comes together in
the narrative, it does not find its outcome there." (179)
Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 3. Trans. Kathleen Blamey
and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 101-2,
104, 127-29, 157-60, 164, 166-69, 171-72, 179.
13. "A key power of narrative, claims Ricoeur, is to 'provide ourselves
with a figure of something.' So doing we can make present what is
absent. Translated into the idiom of historical time, we are dealing
here with the capacity to liberate ourselves from the blind amnesia of
the 'now' by projecting futures and retrieving pasts. Projection is an
emancipatory function of narrative understanding, retrieval a
testimonial function. Both resist the contemporary tendency to reduce
history to a 'depthless present' of 'irreference.'" (99)
14. "Once one recognizes that one's identity is fundamentally narrative
in character, one discovers an ineradicable openness and indeterminacy
at the root of of one's collective memory. Each nation, state or
societas discovers that it is at heart an 'imagined
community' . . . . And that means that qua
narrative construction it can be reinvented and reconstructed." (104-5)
15. "This phenomenon of persuasion has wide-ranging implications for
our understanding of the rapport between ethics and poetics (for
example, rhetoric, tropology, textual exegesis, reader reception).
Narrative persuasion almost always involves some element of ethical
solicitation, however tacit or tangential . . . .
What [Paul] Ricoeur recommends is not a moralism of
abstract rules but an ethics of experience (concerned with cultural
paradigms of suffering and action, happiness and dignity). (112)
Richard Kearney, On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva.
Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology (Burlington,
Vermont: Ashgate Publishing, 2004), 99, 104-5, 112.
16. Narrative as Persuasive/Aesthetic. "The narrative paradigm can be
considered a dialectical synthesis of two traditional strands that
recur in the history of rhetoric: the argumentative, persuasive theme
and the literary, aesthetic theme." (58)
17. The Rational-World Paradigm. "The rational-world paradigm
presupposes: (1) humans are essentially rational beings; (2) the
paradigmatic mode of human decision making and communications is
argument—discourse that features clear-cut inferential or
implicative structures; (3) the conduct of argument is ruled by the
dictates of situations—legal, scientific, legislative, public,
and so on; (4) rationality is determined by subject-matter knowledge,
argumentative ability, and skill in employing the rules of advocacy in
given fields; and (5) the world is a set of logical puzzles that can be
solved through appropriate analysis and application of reason conceived
as an argumentative construct." (59)
18. The Narrative Paradigm. "The presuppositions that undergird the
narrative paradigm are the following: (1) Humans are essentially
storytellers. (2) The paradigmatic mode of human decision making and
communication is 'good reasons,' which vary in form among situations,
genres, and media of communication. (3) The production and practice of
good reasons are ruled by matters of history, biography, culture, and
character . . . . (4) Rationality is determined by
the nature of persons as narrative beings—their inherent
awareness of narrative probability, what constitutes a coherent story,
and their constant habit of testing narrative fidelity, whether or not
the stories they experience ring true with the stories they know to be
true in their lives . . . . (5) The world as we
know it is a set of stories that must be chosen among in order for us
to live life in a process of continual re-creation." (64-65)
19. Narrative Probability and Fidelity. "Rationality within this
perspective invokes principles of narrative probability and narrative
fidelity. These principles contrast with but do not contradict the
traditional concepts or constituents of rationality. They are, in fact,
subsumed within the narrative paradigm. The rational-world paradigm
implies that rationality is a matter of argumentative competence:
knowledge of issues, modes of reasoning, appropriate tests, and rules
of advocacy in given fields. These are essential constituents of
traditional 'rhetorical rationality' . . . . This
rationality is something to be learned, and being rational in these
ways involves a high degree of self-consciousness. Narrative
rationality makes these demands only to the degree that it incorporates
the aspects of rationality that tradition has focused on. Behind this,
however, narrative rationality presupposes the logic of narrative
capacities that we all share . . . . The operative
principle of narrative rationality is identification rather than
deliberation." (66)
20. The Narrative Paradigm as Rational. "Obviously some stories are
better stories than others, more coherent, more 'true' to the way
people and the world are—in perceived fact and value. In other
words, some stories better satisfy the criteria of the logic of good
reasons, which is attentive to reason and values. Persons may
even choose not to participate in the making of public narratives
(vote) if they feel that they are meaningless spectators rather than
co-authors. But all persons are seen as having the capacity to be
rational under the narrative paradigm. And, by and large, persons are
that—at least in fashioning their daily lives. People do not,
however, have the capacity to be equally rational under the
rational-world paradigm. Under the narrative paradigm all are seen as
possessing equally the logic of narration—a sense of coherence
and fidelity." (68)
21. The Narrative Paradigm as Rational and Emotional. "There is hope in
the fact that narrative as a mode of discourse is more universal
and probably more efficacious than argument for nontechnical forms of
communication. There are several reasons why this should be true.
First, narration comes closer to capturing the experience of the world,
simultaneously appealing to the various senses, to reason and emotion,
to intellect and imagination, and to fact and value. It does not
presume intellectual contact only. Second, one does not have to be
taught narrative probability and narrative fidelity; one culturally
acquires them through a universal faculty and
experience . . . . In other words, people are
reflective and from such reflection they make the stories of their
lives and have the basis for judging narratives for and about them."
(75)
Walter R. Fisher, Human Communication as Narration: Toward a
Philosophy of Reason, Value, and Action (Columbia: University of
South Carolina Press, 1987), 58-59, 64-66, 68, 75.
22. Narrative as Symbolic. "Fisher's concepts of probability and
fidelity narrowed Burke's notion of identification, wedding it too
tightly to normative conceptions of rationality,
and . . . this unnecessarily limits our
understanding of the rhetoricality of narrative in general and in
effect renders the narrative paradigm as an overly conservative theory
that fetters both rhetorical theory and criticism. However, by rooting
narrative rationality in Burkean identification Fisher makes the
narrative paradigm, at least implicitly, although not explicitly,
commensurate with the full range of the symbolic 'rationalities' and
with the possibilities of the new rhetoric established by Burke's shift
to identification as the key term of his rhetoric." (191)
23. The Narrative Paradigm as Rational and Normative. "As a result of
Fisher's use of identification, a fundamental contradiction is built
into the narrative paradigm. On the one hand, Fisher advances a
rhetorical rationality of narrative premised on a descriptive
understanding of identification. On the other hand, his assessment of
narratives using probability and fidelity narrows the processes of
identification to the normative criteria of the rational-world. This
narrowing of the processes of identification makes the narrative
paradigm ill-suited to accommodate poststructuralist understandings of
communication and neglects the irrational resources of identification,
those 'puzzlements and ambiguities,' those 'enthymemic elements,' and
those 'partially "unconscious" factors' that are at work in the
everyday narratives by which we live." (198-99)
Kevin McClure, "Resurrecting the Narrative Paradigm: Identification and
the Case of Young Earth Creationism." Rhetoric Society Quarterly
39 (2009): 191, 198-99.
24. Digital Narratives/Multiple Authors. "Modernist writers have stretched
to reimagine what it means to be an author (cf. [James] Joyce's author
who like a god stands back and pares his fingernails), while postmodern
critics have tried to undermine or even deny the role the author plays in
establishing meaning in a text. But all this discomfort with authorship
is nothing compared to the havoc being wrought by contemporary digital
narratives. With the appearance of these interactive experiences,
we get stories that don't eliminate authors: they multiply them,
distribute their energy across a wide field of participants (including
some nonhuman agents), redefine their powers and limits, and in general
rewrite all the rules. In doing so, they usher in a radical new era of
storytelling, one that reflects in exciting but uncomfortable ways the
cultural transformations of our time." (177)
25. Authors/Readers/Texts. "Digital stories—interactive fictions
of all kinds and in video games—radically alter the familiar
triad of author-text-reader and in the process produce new kinds of
narrative. In the digital realm, authorship is dispersed, collaborative,
and unstable. Instead of issuing from the labor of a single author, the
story emerges from the encounter between designer-writers, programmers,
users, and the computer itself. The resulting collaboration is so
many-sided and shifting that it is no longer clear who is telling
the story, nor who is in control, nor where the story begins and
ends. The reader does not passively receive the text but aggressively
intervenes in both the form and content of the story, changing it in
major ways. As for the medium, a pulsating electronic field replaces the
stable text of the printed book. The resulting interplay of the user and
the digital environment produces an improvisatory, seat-of-the-pants,
narrative." (179)
26. Authorship and Ownership. "In digital story, the pact between
teller and reader undergoes profound mutation. Authorship, that acted
as an anchoring presence for the transmission of values through an
encounter with an authoritative other, is now replaced by an unstable,
swiftly shifting, cacophony of voices that receive transmit, alter,
and create in quickly forming and dissolving collaborations. In place
of the dialectical. conversation of author-reader we get ephemeral,
networked, multinodal relationships. The nonhierarchical, improvisatory,
open-ended, or non-ended nature of these narratives undermines authority
and ownership. In a networked world all texts can be appropriated,
so the very notion of proprietary authorship becomes problematic." (182)
27. Beyond Postmodernism. "Both the modernist and postmodern positions do
not offer solutions to the problems of the digital sphere. The modernist
acknowledges disorder only to try to abolish it. The postmodern critique
exalts the instability of the text but leaves no room for the variegated
human relationships that thread through all narratives. How then can we
find and describe a new order in the digital environment? How will these
stories furnish us with the basic prerequisites for narrative—a
trusting relationship between the participants, an anchoring sense of
authority, a strategy for fusing the self and the other?
We can begin by isolating three ways digital
narratives differ from their predecessors: they exist as worlds rather
than as isolated texts; they are events or happenings rather than fully
formed finished objects; and they find unity in the reader/user's
playful activity. Out of these differences we may be able to glimpse
the elements of a new approach to narrative." (185)
28. The Narrative World as Author.
"Authorship . . . does not function as an
agent external to the text, producing the world as the potter does
his vessel. Rather, it appears as an innate feature of a radically
interconnected environment. When users, algorithms, rules, and procedures
meet they produce the world. They are all authors and are both embedded
in the world and exterior to it . . . . Authorship
is inscribed in every element of this environment. One might say the
whole world is mutually coproducing itself." (186-87)
29. The User as Co-Creator. "By exercising their interactive powers,
users become true cocreators of the narrative event. The actual extent
of their creative power depends on the kinds of choices offered them by
the program. Initially, in the eighties and even into the nineties, most
programs offered the user only narrow choices between alternatives. Now,
however, the user has at hand nontrivial choices that resonate through
the whole system. The repertoire of choices is large: users can create
sequences of actions, construct and alter objects, and even choose how
to represent themselves to others. As users encounter the world, their
choices create individual stories, micro-narratives within the larger
story: their fight with the dragon, their solution to
the puzzle of the locked room . . . . Because of
these capabilities to control and transform, some critics have proposed
substituting the term 'configuration' for 'interactivity' to emphasize
the users' dynamic and synthesizing activity." (187)
30. Narrative as Play and as Festival. "Play has always figured in
aesthetic experience. While in reading it is the author's playful mastery
of plot and character and language that sweeps us along, in digital
narratives it is we who skillfully perform through our interaction with
the environment. Absorption in play parallels in some sense the reader's
imaginative immersion in the story. As we react to the challenges of
the environment, pressing keys and pushing joysticks, we may enter a
'flow state' where 'self-consciousness disappears, perceptions of time
become distorted, and concentration becomes so intense that the game or
task completely absorbs us . . . .'
Paradoxically, while play demands that we exert the full powers of our
self in a focused and sustained way, it also makes that self disappear.
In play, we move' outside' of ourselves, for playing involves a loss of
the separate self through a rapt immersion in the
game . . . . When we collaborate with others, as,
for example, in massive multiplayer games, individual play transforms
into the communal form of festival." (189)
31. Authorship and Agency. "The user's activities, unlike those of
the reader, are not simply mental events: a user's choice has palpable
consequences in the digital landscape. Each moment in the unfolding of
the story is the outcome of the various choices made by all the agents
involved, and every interaction alters the state of the world. The story
thus becomes an outward representation of the inward movements of the
participants . . . . Encounters between different
agencies are rendered as public and accessible spaces. The user's
desires, fears, and hopes are instantiated in the actual rendering of
the world." (190)
Larry Friedlander, "Narrative Strategies in a Digital Age: Authorship
and Authority." In Digital Storytelling, Mediatized Stories:
Self-Representations in New Media, ed. Knut Lundby, 177-94, Digital
Formations 52 (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 177, 179, 182, 185-87,
189-90.
B. Illustrations
1. Heard Any Good Stories Lately?:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/158749
2. Today, You Can Write a Story:
http://io9.com/5380260/today-you-can-write-a-story-with-neil-gaiman
Latest Update: 2011-10-24
