Dan Shen's Rhetorical Narratology and Umberto Eco's Semiotic Theory of Interpretation

John Pier (1)

1 CRAL - Centre de recherches sur les arts et le langage

Every reader, listener, or viewer of stories, from the most casual to the most critically attuned, intuits that between the lines or under the surface of the narrated incidents there lies unspoken information and meanings of various kinds, scopes, pertinence, and accessibility that cannot be ignored. “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” tells us something more than the story of a little girl who wanders into the Bear family's house, tastes their porridge, sits in their chairs, and sleeps in their beds. And Umberto Eco once asked: “Is Oedipus Rex the story of detection, incest, or parricide?” (Role 28). Dan Shen addresses such issues with an emphasis on “covert progression,” a narrative movement paralleling plot development that has previously been neglected. I will first discuss the characteristics of Shen's rhetorical narratology and some of its relations with James Phelan's narrative dynamics, structuralist poetics, and Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutic investigation of plot....

Domaines: Littératures

John Pier. Dan Shen's Rhetorical Narratology and Umberto Eco's Semiotic Theory of Interpretation. Style, 2021, 55 (1), pp.29-34. ⟨10.5325/style.55.1.0028⟩. ⟨hal-03869274⟩