Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration

by James Phelan

In Living to Tell about It, James Phelan takes up the challenges offered by diverse narratives including Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss, Ernest Hemingway's "Now I Lay Me," Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day, Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, and John Edgar Wideman's "Doc's Story." Phelan's compelling readings cover important theoretical ground by introducing a valuable distinction between disclosure functions (communications from the implied author to the authorial audience) and narrator functions (communications from the character narrator to the narratee). Phelan also identifies significant types of character narration (also known as first-person narration), including restricted, suppressed, and mask narrations. In addition, Phelan proposes new understandings of such ingrained concepts of narrative theory as unreliable narration, the implied author, focalization, and lyric narrative. Utilizing what Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz have called "theory practice," a critical method that aims to combine theory and interpretation in mutually illuminating ways, Living to Tell about It also makes a major contribution to ethical theory and criticism. Phelan develops the concept of "ethical position" and explores the interactions among the ethical positions of characters, narrators, authors, and audiences. This approach emphasizes not only the close connections between narrative technique and ethics but also the important interactions between the ethical positions of the authorial audience and the flesh-and-blood reader.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

James Phelan is Distinguished University Professor and Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Ohio State University. He received his BA from Boston College (1972) and his MA and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1977). He began as an Assistant Professor at Ohio State in 1977, was promoted to Associate Professor in 1983, to Professor in 1989, to Humanities Distinguished Professor in 2004, and to Distinguished University Professor in 2008. In 2004 he received the University’s Distinguished Research Award and in 2007 the Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award. Phelan served as Department Chair from 1994-2002.

Rather than working in only one historical period, Phelan gravitates toward theoretical issues or problems, most often connected with the genre of narrative, and pursues them in texts from different periods. His recent work, however, has focused primarily on twentieth-century British and American narrative, and he now claims the twentieth-century as a specialty. Much of his research has been devoted to developing a comprehensive rhetorical theory of narrative. He has written about style in Worlds from Words, about character and narrative progression in Reading People, Reading Plots, about technique, ethics, and audiences in Narrative as Rhetoric, about character narration in Living to Tell about It, and about progression (again) and reader judgments in Experiencing Fiction. His forthcoming book, Reading the American Novel, 1920-2010, offers rhetorical readings of ten canonical novels written across this ninety year period.

Phelan has contributed a new chapter on “Narrative Theory, 1966-2006 for the 40th Anniversary edition of Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg’s landmark book, The Nature of Narrative. In addition, he collaborated with David Herman, Peter J. Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol on Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates (Phelan and Rabinowitz co-authored the sections of that book on rhetorical theory.) Phelan has published well over a hundred essays and the autobiographical journal Beyond the Tenure Track.

Phelan’s editorial work is also extensive. He has edited or co-edited seven volumes in narrative studies: Reading Narrative, the Blackwell Companion to Narrative (with Peter J. Rabinowitz), Joseph Conrad (with Jakob Lothe and Jeremy Hawthorn), Teaching Narrative Theory (with Brian McHale and David Herman), Fact, Fiction, and Form: Selected Essays of Ralph W. Rader (with David Richter), and After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future (with Jakob Lothe and Susan Suleiman). In addition, with Gerald Graff, he has edited Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy, which was awarded the 1997 Nancy Dasher Award by the College English Association of Ohio as the best book on pedagogy from an Ohio faculty member for 1994-96, and The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy.

Since 1992, Phelan has been the editor of Narrative, the journal of the International Society for the Study of Narrative and winner of the 1993 CELJ Award for Best New Journal. Since 1993, he has been co-editor, with Peter J. Rabinowitz, and since 2010, with Robyn Warhol, of the Ohio State University Press series on the Theory and Interpretation of Narrative. The series has now published over 35 books.

Reviews

[Janita Holtzhausen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lucid, practical approach to narrative theory.

[Victoria Hawco · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everything I have learned about Lolita has been against my will. Great book though!

[Hilary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not only is this a brilliant articulation for rhetorical criticism (including, thankfully, a paragraph that I get to cite about why I think this particular framework for analysis is WAY better than a traditional reader response lens. I mean, honestly, Jim--yes, I know him; he was one of my professors whom I adore--this man should just write my dissertation for me since, in a single paper alone, I cited him 15 times...) Anyway.

He argues in this for a lot of things having to do with character narration, including, but not limited to, unreliable narration (he comes up with 6 types, at least), suppressed narration, serial narration, mask narration, redundant narration... all tied into the idea of literary aesthetic and ethics. Additionally, he is a completely accessible author--my mom could read this, and, assuming she were familiar with the case study text in any chapter, she'd get it. Again, he uses a mix of "literature" and "fiction" to make his points, which is more helpful than the critics who just refer to obscure fancy-pants high falutin "elite art." This book (which I admittedly had to read part of during last quarter) changed the way I read everything.

[Oscar · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this for my Rhetoric and Poetics course and I enjoyed it despite the fact that I don't agree with everything that writer said. The book basically focuses the different forms of narration, the differences between reliable and unreliable narration, and the question of how narration speaks of the ethics of a story, character, or narrator. The author illustrates much of his model by examining how narration exists in certain works, such as Lolita, Angela's Ashes, The Remains of the Dead, among other works.

[Raisu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phelan is readable, and humorous, his analysis can be followed, and his theories make sense. All this, in the field of literary theory and criticism? Sign me up, please.

[Teresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

The last chapter on lyric narratives was particularly interesting.