Interpreting Pedagogical Acts: Acts 8.26–40 and Narrative Reflexivity as Pedagogy

This article foregrounds a fact so basic that it often goes unnoticed: stories frequently depict the acts of reading and/or interpreting stories; many narratives are themselves concerned with proper modes of narrative interpretation. I contend that such scenes work rhetorically to inculcate particular kinds of hermeneutical skills in their audiences, and thus can be read as pedagogical scenarios vis-à-vis implied readers. I begin the article by introducing the contemporary notion of narrative reflexivity and situating that concept within the broader literary sub-field of rhetorical narratology. Then, I turn to Acts 8.26–40 as a brief case study in order to demonstrate how narrative reflexivity can help us to think in fresh ways about the pedagogical force of ancient narratives. Specifically, I argue that this story in Acts reflexively commends the following hermeneutical principle for its readers: because reading is not synonymous with understanding, one ought to have an authoritative interpretive guide, and embrace a hermeneutic of hospitality towards the received narrative. Finally, I highlight several examples from ancient literature that demonstrate why my proposed reading coheres with ancient views about pedagogy and textual interpretation more broadly.

Toiveikkaan talvimielen mainosretoriikka

The Marketing Rhetoric of Hopeful Winter Spirit. Persuasive Power and Appeal to Senses in the Imagery of Veikko Huovinen’s Hamsterit This article offers a rhetorical reading of Veikko Huovinen’s Hamsterit (”The Hamsters”, 1957). I view the protagonist Hamsteri as a persuasive orator, whose eloquent speeches enhance the mundane practice of gathering winter storage with his literature-influenced aesthetics of survival in the arctic wild. While I focus my analysis on Hamsteri’s speeches, I also consider how authorial designs, the narrator, and other characters echo and complement each other and participate in Hamsteri’s rhetorical and aesthetic effort in a way that creates a poetics of unanimity into the novel, thus powerfully inviting also the reader to join the unanimity. I see similarities between Hamsteri’s rhetoric and TV commercials. is similarity is based on Hamsteri’s vivid imagery, which appeals to all the five senses in order to attach positive associations to the food and clothing that he persuades his friend Rurik to buy, when they prepare for the winter. A recurring device in Hamsteri’s speeches is the speculative description, which grows from vivid imagery and embeds micro stories into the main narrative, while also giving full freedom for his comically imaginative speculations. In surveying the comic aspects of Hamsteri’s speculative descriptions, I combine narratological and stylistic analysis by employing both the audience concepts of rhetorical narratology and the classical rhetorical figures as my conceptual tools.

New Testament Rhetorical Narratology: An Invitation toward Integration

We are witnessing these days a remarkable rapprochement between the study of rhetoric and the study of narrative. Indeed, these two approaches to New Testament texts are apparently so different that in 2008, Vernon Robbins could lament the “widespread consensus” among scholars that it is “not possible to formulate a systematic rhetorical approach to narrative portions of the Gospels and Acts.” And yet, this bifurcation has been shortsighted. It is not only possible but also necessary and beneficial to bring the resources and insights of narratology into conversation with the resources and insights of rhetorical criticism. This article participates in the move to build bridges across the theoretical crevasses that have divided “New Testament rhetoric” and “New Testament narrative.” First, I take a panoramic view, broadly outlining several reasons that the dividing lines continue to hold currency in New Testament scholarship, and why these views are misguided. I then propose that we reimagine the boundaries of the “New Testament and rhetoric” to include narrative as a mode of persuasion in and of itself, using resources from the literary subfield of rhetorical narratology. Finally, I offer a brief analysis of the uses of speech and silence in Acts 15:1–35 in order to demonstrate how the tools of rhetorical narratology can help us to think in fresh ways about the rhetorical force of New Testament narratives.

Unnatural narratology: core issues and critical debates

Taking anti-mimetic narratives as its primary object of investigation, unnatural narratology aspires to establish its status as a discipline of unnatural poetics. In recent years, it has rapidly developed into one of the most prominent sub-branches of postclassical narratology, standing in direct parallel to feminist narratology, rhetorical narratology, and cognitive narratology. This paper begins by delineating various definitions of unnatural narrative and proceeds to discuss unnaturalness, interpretative strategies, heuristic values, and the interrelations between unnatural narratology and other schools of narratological thought, so as to investigate the core issues of unnatural narratology and the critical debates on it. The paper ends with an outline set of directions for future explorations in this field.

Functions of figurativity for the narrative in lyric poetry – with a study of English and German poetic epitaphs from the 17th century

Lyric poetry is a genre where discourse types such as description, argumentation, contemplation and narrative can occur together, though in varying combinations. During the last two decades, research has been devoted to the question of how to describe and to study such use of narrativity in lyric poetry. As Hühn (2007) puts it, ‘poetry can profitably be analysed on the basis of narratological categories’. However, this article argues that such a narratological analysis can never replace the traditional lyric analysis. The aim of this article is to combine the means of classical lyric analysis and narratological toolboxes with those of the new rhetorical narratology, in order to explore the impact of figurativity (i.e. micro-narrative stylistic characteristics on the ‘ discours level’ of the poem) on the ‘ histoire level’ (or the level of the enounced, Müller-Zettelmann, 2002) and on the reader of the poetic text in question. As an example, I will study English and German poetic epitaphs from the 17th century, because this early sub-genre of lyric poetry provides enough distance from a restrictive mainstream-romantic understanding of poetry and, at the same time, shows a high degree of figurativity with complex functions. In these texts, figurative elements such as synecdoche and metonymy create ‘discourse events’ at the level of enunciation (with the ‘lyrical I’ as the agent of a decisive change in consciousness or attitudes), but in some cases figurative elements even create (decisive changes that ‘the reader is meant to perform’, Hühn, 2007) that steer the reader’s mental construction of the poem’s ‘story world’, as a key aspect of the text’s narrativity.

Usandsynligheder, overkrydsninger og umuligheder. En retorisk tilgang til brud på den mimetiske karakternarrations kode

IMPROBABILITIES, CROSSOVERS, AND IMPOSSIBILITIES | Extending and to some extent revising some of his earlier work, James Phelan in this essay examines three kinds of “unnatural”departures from the mimetic code. Paralepsis (or implausible knowledgeable narration), simultaneous present-tense character narration, and a kind of departure not previously noticed, which he calls cross over narration: “an author links the narration of two independent sets of events by transferring the effects of the narration of the one to the other.” In spite of being rather different ways of breaching the mimetic code, the three breaks form a useful cluster for investigating underlying conventions of reading that can explain why readers often do not notice the breakes. Phelan thus induces two Meta-Rules of Readerly Engagement: The Value Added Meta-Rule underlies the principle that disclosurefunctions trump narrator functions, and stipulates that readers overlook breaks in the mimetic code when those breaks enhance their reading experience; the Story over Discourse Meta-Rule stipulates that once a narrative foregrounds its mimetic component, readers will privilege story elements over discourseelements, and thus be inclined to overlook breaks in the code. Four additional Rules are derived from the Meta-Rules in a reading of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which serves as an example ofimplausibly knowledgeable narration. Rules and Meta-Rules are then deployed in reading a passage of The Great Gatsby, exemplifying crossover narration. A discussion with Henrik Skov Nielsen about the simultaneous present-tense narration in Glamorama marks both the closeness and a certain differencein perspective between rhetorical narratology and Nielsen’s concept of narration without narrators.