How Do Stories Convince Us? Notes Towards A Rhetoric of Narrative

Abstract

This essay posits the conceptual rudiments of "rhetoric of narrative." Approaching contemporary narrative theory according to the classical trivium, the essay explores what and how stories mean and argue. It focuses on the relevance and value of the rhetorical tradition for illuminating distinctive features of a "rhetoric of narrative," showing how a "rhetoric" of narrative builds upon a "grammar" and a "logic" of narrative. Ultimately the essay posits that narratives can be positioned at some point along a continuum represented by poles roughly characterized as "aesthetic" and "ideological," with propagandistic argument lying at the latter extreme. The chief literary example for applying the conceptual distinctions emerging from our investigations is George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.