Rhetorical Persons/Narrative Persons
Julie Orlemanski (University of Chicago)

  

What are the relations between rhetorical personae and narrative characters? When, for instance, a medieval schoolboy pens a speech for Dido, as an exercise of ethopoeia, what power does that impassioned speech have to expand into a narrative world? Is such a world available for narrative reimagination? Or, to take up the question from the other direction—what happens when someone merely referred to, an entity narrated and spoken about, opens their mouth and begins to talk? What is at stake in assuming a voice? When is an ‘I’ best regarded as a mere deictic, a reflex of experiential language, and when does it cohere into a concrete individual? These questions pertain to the unstable but fertile terrain between rhetorical persons and narrative persons—a significant area of experimentation and play for medieval writers. It has also been the site for much important recent work in medieval literary studies, where scholarship on personification (e.g., Breen, Zeeman), voice (e.g., Lawton, Curry Woods), narration (e.g., Spearing, Meyer-Lee), and character intersects. Proposals for panels or papers might take up the following: 

  • The interplay of lyric utterance and narrative action
  • The status of “the narrator”
  • The relation between discursive genres (e.g., dialogue, lyric, prayer) and narrative genres (e.g., romance, biblical narrative)
  • Genres mediating between rhetorical persons and narrative persons (e.g., first-person allegory, dit, framed story-collection, drama)
  • Personification
  • Ethopoeia, rhetorical inventio and its limits
  • “Round” characters and techniques of characterization 
  • Metafiction and metalepsis (or the transgression of narrative levels)
  • The reality, or fictionality, of literary persons

 

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