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The modern era of globalization presents a situation where indigenous cultures are potentially being eroded away. As a result, leaders of these groups need to begin using effective rhetorical strategies in their efforts to defend their worldview against the dominating views of Western ideology. This thesis attempts to present a case study analysis of the work of two leaders in the Native American rights movement: George Manuel and Vine Deloria, Jr. Manuel'­s book The Fourth World: An Indian Reality and Deloria's Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence are presented as examples for how modern indigenous leaders can use narrative argument, addressing the persuasive functions of social movements, to foster political action on a people-to-people, national, and transnational level. / Master of Arts

Though tabletop role-playing games, or TRPGs, have received some scholarly attention since the creation of Dungeons and Dragons in the 1970s, very few scholars have considered how TRPGs function as a vehicle for long-form narrative. As an inherently collaborative form of narrative, the TRPG demonstrates a unique relationship between author and audience, as participants take on both roles during play. Previous narratological models of author-audience interaction are insufficient to understand the way that authorship functions in the TRPG, and the rise of actual play shows, where TRPGs are broadcast for an audience of nonparticipants, adds an extra layer of complexity to these author-audience relations. This thesis identifies key narrative elements of the TRPG, including game mechanics, framing, and collaboration, and examines how popular actual play shows and their graphic adaptations engage with these elements to create their narratives. This examination indicates that TRPGs create complex author-webs where each participant is both author and audience, and this influence pushes actual play shows and further adaptations of TRPG narratives to expand the ways in which audiences can influence and interact with narratives as they are created. The TRPG genre continues to explore how these elements can be developed beyond traditional understandings of narrative, and this development provides a framework for further narratological study of interactive works, which will only continue to evolve and grow in popularity and complexity in the continuing digital era. / Master of Arts / The tabletop role-playing game, or TRPG, has been growing in popularity since the creation of Dungeons and Dragons in the 1970s, and the rise of the actual play show, where a TRPG game is broadcast to viewers via video or podcast, has spurred both casual and scholarly interest in the TRPG. Players of TRPGs create narratives through collaborative storytelling moderated by certain rules and game mechanics, so each participant in a TRPG acts as both author and audience, as they create certain elements of the narrative and also witness the narrative creations of the other players. This particular collaborative author-audience model is not seen in any other form of narrative, and existing models of author-audience interactions do not account for authorship in the TRPG. Therefore, this thesis examines how several elements of the TRPG, such as the use of game mechanics to structure the narrative, the multiple frames in which players interact with each other, and the collaboration inherent in every game, contribute to the ways that authorship and audience interact in the narrative. It also looks at how popular actual play shows and the graphic novels they've created of their narratives engage with these elements to create their own unique audience interactions. As audience participation in the development of the stories they're consuming become more prominent with the rise of video games and other interactive media, an understanding of the evolving relationship between authorship and audience developed by the TRPG becomes important for examining interactive works in general.

The thesis discusses the development of nineteenth century responses to the United States. It hinges upon the premise that travel writing is narrative and that the travelling itself must therefore be constructed (or reconstructed) as narrative in order to make it available for writing. By applying narratology to the work of literary travel writers from Frances Trollope to Henry James I show the influence of travelling point of view and writing point of view on the narrative. Where these two points of view are in conflict I suggest reasons for this and identify signs in the narrative which display the disparity. There are several influences on point of view which are discussed in the thesis. The first is mode of travel: the development of steamboats and later locomotives increasingly divested travellers from the landscape through which they were travelling. I concentrate on Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain travelling by boat, and Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James travelling by rail to examine how mode of travel alters travelling point of view and influences the form of travel writing. The second is the frontier: writing from a liminal space creates a certain point of view and makes travel not only a passage but a rite of passage. I examine travel texts which discuss the Western frontier as well as the transatlantic frontier. As the opportunity for these frontier experiences diminished through the spread of American culture and developments in travel technology, so the point of view of the traveller changes. A third point of view is provided by European ideas of nature and beauty in nature. The failure of these when put against American landscapes such as the Mississippi, prairies, and Niagara forms a significant part of the thesis, the fourth chapter of which examines writing on Niagara Falls in guidebooks and the travel texts of Frances Trollope, Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Anthony Trollope, Twain and James. Other points of view include seeing the United States through earlier travel texts and adopting a more autobiographical interest in travelogues. In the final chapter the thesis contains a discussion of the nature of truth in travel writing and the tendency towards fictionalisation. The thesis concludes by considering the implications for truth of having various travelling and writing points of view impact upon constructing narrative out of travel.

This dissertation project provides a methodological contribution to the field of critical rhetoric by positioning narrative theory as a powerful yet underutilized tool for examining the power dynamic between producer and consumer in a participatory media context. Drawing on theories of author and audience from rhetorical narratology, this study shows how producers of media texts provide rhetorical cues to audiences that allow them to reassert their power in the form of creative authority vis-à-vis consumers. The genre of professional wrestling serves as an ideal text for examining such power dynamics, as WWE has adapted to changing fan participatory behaviors throughout its sixty-year history. Focusing on pivotal moments in which WWE altered its narrative address to its audience in order to reassert its control over the production process, this study demonstrates the utility of narrative theory for understanding how creative authority shows power at work in media texts. Further, this study situates rhetorical narratology in conversation with theories of rhetorical persona, scholarship on subcultures, and the discursive construction of the “people.” In so doing, I show how a nuanced understanding of author and audience augments critical rhetorical scholarship’s focus on power. Finally, by applying narrative theory as a method for both close textual analysis of single texts as well as a tool for piecing together a critical text from narrative fragments, I also address questions of the role of the text in rhetorical criticism and the role of authorship in an era when audiences exert influence on media texts as they are produced.

This thesis investigates the narrative models in Dante's Commedia with the aim of opening up the poem to alternatives to the dominant narrative embedded in the text, which it terms Dante's masterplot. This is the teleological trajectory which allows the poet to subjugate earlier works or earlier parts of the poem to the revisionist gaze of its endpoint. The thesis analyses the masterplot's workings in the text and its role in the interpretation of the poem, and documents its overwhelming success in influencing readings of the Commedia. It then explores three competing narrative models that resist and counter its monopoly, which are enacted by (i) paradoxes, (ii) alternative endings and parallel lives; and (iii) the future. Paradoxes are used to neutralise the teleological hierarchy and thus allow Dante to represent contradictory ideas and experiences in the temporal medium of language. Through counterfactuals and twin episodes, Dante establishes in his poem a number of storylines that detour from and run parallel to the main narrative; this allows him to make room for an affective space within the text, which suspends narrative necessity and moral normativity. The future tense poses a problem case for the masterplot in that it indefinitely postpones the endpoint on which teleology relies, and thus exposes the poem, and its author's, vulnerability to time and circumstance. By focusing on non-linear modes of storytelling, the thesis questions interpretations of the Commedia that favour one normative master-truth, and highlights instead the manifold poetic, theological and ethical tensions which, due to the masterplot's influence, are often overlooked. The thesis concludes with a proposal that, alongside the traditional notions of Dante's characteristic plurality of linguistic registers and styles, Dante's narrative pluralism can and should come to play a key role in contemporary and future readings of the Commedia.

My dissertation applies narrative theory and ordinary language philosophy to two major works bookending medieval English literature: Beowulf and Le Morte Darthur. Capitalizing on the descriptive power of narrative theory's lexicon, I outline the aesthetics, rhetoric, and other effects on the reader when these medieval writers depict transgressive movements--theoretically termed metalepsis--across borders in the story world, and over boundaries separating that world from our own. I often find that spatial transgressions, as they are visualized in narrative terms, entail or simultaneously occur with a breakdown of the fourth wall separating fiction from its audience. Malory's Sir Lancelot crosses into a spiritual world in pursuit of the Holy Grail only to arrive at an awareness of his existence as narrated fiction. My dissertation argues that moments like this, first analyzed through narrative theory, challenge the reader to recognize the fictional character's force of life, and in so doing expand the imagination to reconsider those metaphysical distinctions that have long rendered the nonhuman inferior. Those distinctions are unnecessary and often senseless, I argue. The ethics of reading fiction that I propose seeks the acknowledgment of limits to knowledge, to what we can claim to know about literature, its characters, and, indeed, our fellow human beings. Given that they are constructed by our ordinary language use, fictional characters are the essence of the other. Fictions, then, and as Stanley Cavell would agree, serve as testing grounds for our capacities of acknowledgment. I argue that both the Beowulf poet and Malory fashioned fictional worlds that preserve a secular heroism from potentially hostile contexts. In the process, these medieval narratives show us that fictional characters move us as a matter of ordinary language--our ordinary interactions with narrative: they play a significant role in our lives that cannot be reduced to any particular theory. There is no need for recourse to ontological, or theological, frameworks to invest them with some unutterable or mysterious meaning. They matter as a matter of course.

This thesis examines five books by the American author Philip Roth commonly referred to as the “Roth Books,” which are The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography(1988), Deception (1990), Patrimony: A True Story (1991), Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993), and The Plot Against America (2004). These books, held together by the author’s proper name, are often viewed as texts that conflate fiction and nonfiction or demonstrate the “fictionality” of all factual narrative accounts in compliance with well-known postmodernist and poststructuralist theories. Contrary to this view, I argue that a valid understanding of the Roth Books demands that we acknowledge that these works represent a series of quite different ways for the author to transform his own life into written form, a creative act which is manifested in both fictional and nonfictional writing. In the attempt to argue this view, I turn to a field of study where the question about criteria for distinguishing fictional from nonfictional narrative literature has occupied a prominent place: narrative theory. However, my theoretical and methodological point of departure does not align itself with the “standard” paradigm in narrative theory with its origin in classical, structuralist narratology. Rather, the thesis promotes a pragmatic and rhetorical perspective which is argued to better account for how we read and make sense of different narrative texts. In opposition to standard narrative theory, where all narratives are considered to adhere to the same model of communication, I argue in favour of a view where narrative fiction and narrative nonfiction are conceived as distinct communicative practices. I open the thesis by showing that Roth’s books contribute to the discussion on how to distinguish fictional from nonfictional narrative texts (Chapter 1). I then continue by approaching the distinction between fiction and nonfiction in general theoretical terms (Chapter 2). And in what follows (Chapters 3-5), I present a reading where the Roth Books are juxtaposed against each other. This reading demonstrates how these texts, although in some sense related, because of their divergent qualities and differing intentions still communicate differently with their readers, inviting a readerly attention that is dissimilar from one work to the other.