Narrative as Rhetoric in The Faerie Queene
This chapter synthesizes a number of critical accounts of Elizabethan humanist culture to construct a dynamic interplay among three different models of reading: reading as if seeing, opposed by the text’s iconoclasm; reading as if hearing, based on traces of orality in the rhetoric; and reading as if reading, a.k.a. “perusing.” The chapter focuses on the episode of Phaon/Phedon, Furor, and Occasion in Book 2 to demonstrate its thesis that the text of Book 2 resists an allegorical program based on the ideological values of Temperance.