Novels and Arguments

Download or read book Novels and Arguments written by Zahava Karl McKeon and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this absorbing study--the first comprehensive exploration of the rhetoric of the novel--Zahava Karl McKeon investigates the complex interrelations of critical poetics, grammars, dialectics, and rhetorics to devise a systematic means of dealing with the structure of prose works as communicative objects. Using the vocabulary and conceptual resources of Aristotle and Cicero, she pursues this exploration to discover the kinds of arguments that characterize novels, to find a way of distinguishing novels from other discursive wholes, and to discriminate different genres of the novel. McKeon's arguments are supplemented by readings of a variety of texts, including the novels and stories of Gunter Grass, John Fowles, Robert Coover, and Flannery O'Connor.