CHAPTER 3 The Rhetorical Approach Revisited and Updated: Phelan’s Theory of Unreliable Narration 111

Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Stock

This chapter addresses the complaint that extreme intentionalism standardly forces the reader who engages in interpretation to posit private, or hidden, authorial intentions, for which she has little or no evidence. It is first argued that there are no automatic strategies of interpretation of fictional content: at every stage, whether or not a given interpretative strategy is to be appropriately applied depends on the presence of relevant authorial intention as a sanction. (This section includes a discussion, and rejection, of the views of David Lewis and Gregory Currie about fictional truth; a discussion of the relevance of genre to fictional content; and a consideration of the issue of unreliable narration for an intentionalist view.) The foregoing material on strategies of interpretation is then used to show that it is false to think of the extreme intentionalist as being committed to ‘hidden’ or ‘secret’ meanings in the ordinary case.


2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-338
Author(s):  
Daniel Del Gobbo

This article revisits long-standing debates about objective interpretation in the common law system by focusing on a crime novel by Agatha Christie and judicial opinion by the Ontario High Court. Conventions of the crime fiction and judicial opinion genres inform readers’ assumption that the two texts are objectively interpretable. This article challenges this assumption by demonstrating that unreliable narration is often, if not always, a feature of written communication. Judges, like crime fiction writers, are storytellers. While these authors might intend for their stories to be read in certain ways, the potential for interpretive disconnect between unreliable narrators and readers means there can be no essential quality that marks a literary or legal text’s meaning as objective. Taken to heart, this demands that judges try to narrate their decisions more reliably so that readers are able to interpret the texts correctly when it matters most.


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