Description
Book SynopsisNarrative Fissures: Reading and Rhetoric is a guide to applied rhetorical criticism of narrative in diverse fields such as cultural studies, ethnography, psychotherapy, historiography, critical legal studies, education, communication, and medicine. The book offers an interdisciplinary toolbox for reading and writing by mapping textual sites as fissures, points of entry for critical reading. These fissures range from short phrases analyzed in the introduction to the fissures of prefacing, framing, textual voices, and gaps discussed in relation to individual texts in part I. Theoretical understanding of rhetorical analysis is combined with technical application of the concept of fissures to suggest methods of reflectively reflexive reading. This section of the book demonstrates techniques of textual entry and analytic anchoring, looking at framing, vocal multiplicity, and narrative time in relation to reader response. Part II shifts perspective to look at writing, exploring ethnography through the concept of fissures in order to suggest methods and uses for reflectively reflexive writing in diverse fields. The critical reading skills surveyed in part I are translated into writing strategies rebalancing the narrative hierarchies of traditional author-informant-reader relations. The final section of the book considers the ethical implications of narrative choices through focus on a single key fissure - narrative resolution - in three similarly situated contemporary fictions. The aim of this last and most tentative section of the book is to provoke thought and invite discussion of the important and under-theorized ethical aspects of narrative. In its structure of progressively tentative consideration of reading, writing, and ethics, Narrative Fissures is also rhetorically self-reflexive, enacting, together with its reader, applications and implications of contemporary thought on narrative.
