Browsing by Subject "Narratology"

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    The rhetorical potential of images in popular accounts of historical events.
    (2010-11) Scruton, William Christopher
    In The Rhetorical Potential of Images in Popular Accounts of Historical Events, I develop a methodological toolkit for analyzing persuasive visuals and use those lenses—technological, perceptual, semantic/semiotic, societal pragmatic, and inferential—to evaluate a multimodal narrative in Matthew Paris's thirteenthcentury Chronica Majora. Focusing on the sententious role of the chronicling narrative form and the moralizing purpose of the exemplars that most influenced Matthew's style, I argue that Matthew's practice of image-construction was an historiographic—not decorative—act and explore the ways in which the layout, organization, and illustration of Chronica Majora produced a mnemonic and epistemic machine—a purposeful, rhetorical encyclopedia of human experience and a guide to right behavior. Within this grounded framework, I address questions of broader import, including the cognitive functions of narrative form, the influence of socialization and enculturation in shaping the semiotic and rhetorical vernaculars of discourse communities, and the function of communicative artifacts as interfaces connecting the material domain with the intellectual lifeworlds of the producers and interpreters of communicative artifacts.
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    Unnatural Narrative and Temporal Distortion in Vergil's Aeneid
    (2023-08) Baker, Samuel
    The Aeneid is a work steeped in the traditions of classical epic following Homerand has been long interpreted as a successor to his poems. Like the Iliad and Odyssey, it tells a story from the epic past, but with one key difference: Vergil tells a myth of Rome’s own origins. My research explores how the Aeneid combines distinct time periods into a single narrative, transgressing conventional narrative approaches. I draw on the theory of unnatural narratology to explain how impossible or illogical events are understood in the Aeneid. Even though the hero Aeneas is a pre-Roman foundational figure, he encounters Roman influence in multiple impossible episodes throughout the epic. He meets Roman heroes in the underworld, visits the city of Rome, and views a picture of Rome’s history. All of these events should not be contemporaneous with Aeneas, but their coexistence signifies that the rules of narrative have changed. The poem folds the past and future together in unprecedented ways, disrupting the boundaries of what narrative usually does. Given the cultural context and strict genre-based rules of classical epic, these effects produce an “unnatural” narrative deviating from real-world conventions of time, space, and logic. I argue that the unnatural qualities of the narrative influence how the poem should be interpreted, particularly as a normative vision of the Roman past from the first century BCE.