Author: Matt Russell
Russell, Matt, 2021 The rhetoric of time in story and discourse, Flinders University, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
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This thesis analyses the types of temporal deformations found in fiction and their potential persuasive use. The results are organised using Renaissance rhetoric as a model for categorisation and prescriptive use. The creative component then demonstrates the application of this research in the form of a new novel manuscript.
The resources of classical rhetoric are most commonly found as detritus across contemporary literary theory and cultural studies. Even though rhetoric is the oldest form of literary criticism, the persuasive intent of fiction is more commonly examined using theories such as reader-response, speech act theory, and phenomenology.
Using Umberto Eco’s theory of the model reader along with the narratological method of Gérard Genette, this thesis recognises a tripartite division in temporal structures as story time, discourse time, and reader time. It then analyses the temporal changes available and categorises the results as changes to the three diegetic levels: actantial, discursive, and inferential. Each chapter focuses on a different master trope of time. The four main types of temporal movement are identified as quickness, lingering, prolepsis, and analepsis. Each temporal structure is analysed using examples from the works of Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe and their application to my own work.
Keywords: Rhetoric, Dickens, Poe, Eco, Genette, creative writing, narratology
Subject: Creative Arts thesis
Thesis type: Doctor of Philosophy
Completed: 2021
School: College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Supervisor: Amy Matthews