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Judgment, Progression, and Ethics in Portrait Narratives: The Case of Alice Munro's 'Prue'

Abstract:

Alice Munro’s “Prue” (1984) is a formally innovative short story that eschews epiphany or any other sign of change or movement on the part of its protagonist and that nevertheless offers its audience a highly moving experience. I attempt to account for the story’s effective unconventionality by examining the interrelations between its form and its ethical dimension. I locate those interrelations in the interactions of narrative judgment and narrative progression. More specifically, I identify three main kinds of narrative judgment — interpretive, ethical, and aesthetic, and their connections to three main kinds of progression — those we associate with narrativity, lyricality, and what I call portraiture.  Portraiture is a mode, familiar in the dramatic monologues of Browning, in which the main goal is the representation of character. By examining the interaction of judgment and progression in “Prue,” I argue that it is both a highly successful hybrid form, one that synthesizes narrativity and portraiture, and that this understanding leads us to its ethical dimension. I close with some observations about larger implications of the analysis for our understanding of both other hybrid forms and the utility of this rhetorical approach to form and ethics.

 

 

May 2019 update: James Phelan is Distinguished University Professor at Ohio State University. His research has been devoted to developing a viable account of narrative as rhetoric. He has written about style in Worlds from Words; about character and narrative progression in Reading People, Reading Plots; about voice, character narration, ethics, and audiences in Narrative as Rhetoric; about the rhetoric and ethics of character narration in Living to Tell about It; and about narrative judgments and progression in Experiencing Fiction.  He has taken up the relationship between literary history and rhetorical analysis in Reading the American Novel, 1920-2010 (2013), and he has further extended the conception and consequences of his rhetorical approach in Somebody Telling Somebody Else: A Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative (2017).  In 2020, he and Matthew Clark will publish Debating Rhetorical Narratology: On the Synthetic, Mimetic, and Thematic Aspects of Narrative. He has also engaged in direct scholarly give-and-take in Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates co-authored with David Herman, Peter J. Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol (2012). In 1991, Phelan brought out the autobiographical journal Beyond the Tenure Track: Fifteen Months in the Life of an English Professor. 

In addition to publishing well over 100 essays, Phelan has edited or co-edited seven collections of essays, including the Blackwell Companion to Narrative Theory (with Peter J. Rabinowitz, 2005), Teaching Narrative Theory (with David Herman and Brian McHale), and After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future (with Susan R. Suleiman and Jakob Lothe, 2012).  With Gerald Graff, he has edited two textbooks for the classroom, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy (1995, 2004), and The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy (2000, 2009)

Since 1992, Phelan has been the editor of Narrative, the journal of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature. Since 1993, he has been co-editor, with Peter J. Rabinowitz (1993-2018), Robyn Warhol (2012-2016), and Katra Byram (2017--), of the Ohio State University Press series on the Theory and Interpretation of Narrative.

 

Publisher's Version

Volume 4, issue 2 Narrative as a Way of Thinking
Last updated on 04/18/2020