Book Reviews

243

purchase individual chapters at US$29.95 each, which would allow for their meaningful
integration with other course materials. All chapters are available in electronic format a
la carte on the Palgrave website, specifically dedicated to this volume.
Nearly all the chapters end with suggestions about what new avenues of academic
inquiry may be applied to the already discussed aspects of (im)politeness – in this regard,
The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness does not quite meet the goals of its
editors to introduce the main elements of the field ‘in a palatable and useful fashion’ (p. 7).
Although the general structure can be seen as a strength in presenting theoretically
fragmented material, it remains the volume’s most questionable low point; with the
exception of the introductory section on Foundations, the haphazardness of arranging the
main sections brings into question the process of compiling the volume; one might sus-
pect that a general call for articles on (im)politeness had been issued, followed by the
editorial dilemma on how to organise the staggering amount of writing, all connected
only by the very concept of (im)politeness. Apart from the typical academic discussion,
most chapters present pertinent case studies to place the theoretical material in a broader,
more practical context, but what that context is remains unclear – these case studies may
be of tremendous interest and help to prospective students of (im)politeness as a guiding
example of where future scholars of the field might turn to next. Although framed by the
general conceptual structure of its parent section, each chapter can easily stand on its
own and serve as the basis for further discussion – individual chapters can be utilised as
a springboard for future research, academic debate, class discussion or even student
projects.

James Phelan, Somebody Telling Somebody Else: A Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative. Ohio State
University Press: Columbus, 2017; 304 pp.: ISBN: 9780814213452, US$89.95 (hbk), ISBN:
9780814254318, US$29.95 (pbk), ISBN: 9780814275221, $19.95 (pdf).

Reviewed by: Xiaoqing Qiu, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China

It has been a delight to read James Phelan. His latest book on rhetorical theory is no
exception. The book title Somebody Telling Somebody Else highlights the multi-direc-
tional purposive communication from tellers to audiences. The term ‘teller’ refers to not
only authors and narrators but also characters in dialogue with each other. Here, the term
‘audience’ refers to both authorial audiences (i.e. ideal audiences), and actual audiences
(i.e. flesh and blood audiences), especially rhetorical readers who Phelan defines as the
actual audiences who join the authorial audiences (p. 27). In other words, rhetorical read-
ers are actual readers focussed on authorial audiences so that they can avoid missing
things in the authorial communication that they are supposed to get. The subtitle A
Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative stresses Phelan’s view of interpretation as ‘a fundamen-
tal raison d’etre’ of rhetorical poetics and his ‘aim for more general conclusions applica-
ble to other narratives’ than the individual narratives that the book interprets (xi). Phelan
reiterates that rhetorical poetics is ‘invested in the ideal of fully understanding narrative
communication as well as the practical details of actual somebodies communicating with
actual others’ (p. 116), and that rhetorical theory is ultimately interested in public, textu-
alised intention rather than private intention (p. 196).
244 Language and Literature 27(3)

Most chapters of the book appeared as separate essays in the years 2007–2015. The
texts under discussion cover diverse genres and types, ranging from fiction with
character(s) as narrator to fiction mainly composed of character-character dialogue, and
from fiction to nonfiction such as memoir and autobiography, and from literary narrative
to graphic narrative. The whole book consists of two parts: Part I ‘On the explanatory
power of rhetorical poetics’ (Chapters 1–2), and Part II ‘Resources: generic frames, tech-
niques, occasions – and synergies’ (Chapters 3–13). While the two chapters of Part I deal
with ‘somebody’ (the teller), focussing on character – character in dialogue, and ‘some-
body else’ (the audience), centring on crossover phenomenon, respectively, Part II gives
primary attention to resources such as narrative speed, progression toward a surprise
ending, probability, ambiguity, textual recalcitrance and occasions of narration. While
Chapters 2–4 mainly discuss probability, Chapters 5–13 discuss the relations among
authors, character narrators and audiences.
The book is valuable for a number of reasons. First, Phelan puts forward a multi-
directional narrative communication model. He foregrounds the distinctiveness of char-
acter-character narration, which has been under-theorised, arguing that character-character
dialogue is mediated transmission in nature and reveals a lot about the ethics of the
characters. So he contends that Seymour Chatman’s (1978) unidirectional model is inad-
equate. By making a detailed analysis of the character-character dialogue in George
Higgins’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle and John O’Hara’s ‘Appearances’, Phelan draws
the convincing conclusion that a narrative model ‘needs to identify the characters as
distinct agents of narration’ (p. 18). He thus suggests three mediated channels: the author-
character-character-audience channel, the author-narrator-audience channel, and the
author-structural arrangement-audience channel, each of which can interact with the
other two. He replaces Chatman’s model with a chart of constants and variables, with
author and audience as constants and resources as variables (p. 25–26). Thus he wants
the title of his book Somebody Telling Somebody Else to be shorthand for ‘somebody
using the resources of narrative in order to accomplish certain purposes in relation to
certain audiences’ (x).
Second, Phelan draws on Aristotle’s ‘probable impossibility’ to explain the probabil-
ity of textually impossible scenes in some literary works and to distinguish between
rhetorical narratology and unnatural narratology. He points out that rhetorical narratol-
ogy emphasises the ‘probable’ side (in other words, audiences’ response) of a ‘probable
impossibility’ whereas unnatural narratology emphasises the ‘impossibility’ (that is, tex-
tual phenomena) (p. 52). He gives seven reasons for the existence of probable impossi-
bility and dubs them ‘five Rules and two Meta-Rules of Thumb’ (p. 47). With these rules
and meta-rules, he provides an illuminating analysis of the probability in The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby. He also uses the rules to interpret the crosso-
ver phenomena in David Small’s graphic memoir Stitches and Jhumpa Lahiri’s short
story ‘The Third and Final Continent’ (Chapter 2 and Chapter 11, respectively), where
readerly dynamics cross over into textual dynamics and thus makes the events appear
logical. I find Phelan’s ‘five Rules and two Meta-Rules’ useful and convincing, as they
offer detailed and logical explanations of the probability of a textual impossibility.
Third, as usual, Phelan remains open to other theories and effectively uses them to com-
plement rhetorical theory. In Chapter 8, he demonstrates the compatibility and
Book Reviews 245

complementarity of cognitive theory and rhetorical theory. He draws on Lisa Zunshine’s

(2006) insights on ‘metarepresentation’ and Alan Palmer’s (2010) work on ‘social minds’
to offer a brilliant reading of Toni Morrison’s determinate ambiguity in her short story
‘Recitatif’. In Chapter 11, Phelan combines rhetorical theory with the lines of inquiry of
postcolonial and cosmopolitan theory to look into the crossover effect in ‘The Third and
Final Continent’.
Fourth, Phelan gives illuminating interpretation of textual stubbornness. In Chapter 3,
he tackles the textual recalcitrance of Herr Bendemann’s motives and Georg’s judg-
ment’s basis in Franz Kafka’s first mature work ‘Das Urteil’ by paying special attention
to the narrative speed of the story and the progression toward a surprise ending. Phelan
finds that the textual stubbornness actually results in the move of interpretation from the
mimetic component to the thematic and synthetic components of the story, which in turn
leads to a reading of the story as a parable rather than a psychological study. Furthermore,
in Chapter 7, Phelan studies the textual recalcitrance of Lord Jim by attending to the
affective and ethical consequences of Jim’s stubbornness and concludes that ‘fore-
grounding the stubbornness of a major element of a narrative can paradoxically enhance
its power’ (p. 149).
Last but not least, Phelan clarifies several terms in rhetorical theory. One of them is
‘rhetorical reader’. He uses the term ‘to identify those members of the actual audience
focussed on entering the authorial audience’ (p. 27). When discussing rhetorical theory’s
assumptions about fiction and nonfiction, Phelan defines literary nonfiction narrative as
‘a work that offers the reader a representation of actual people and events that is simul-
taneously responsible to their existence outside the textual world and shaped in the ser-
vice of some underlying authorial purpose designed to give the people and events
authentic, affective, and ethical significance and force that would not be apparent with-
out such shaping’ (p. 72; original emphasis). Phelan also reconsiders the term ‘unreliabil-
ity’ and gives his new understanding of the relation between reliable and unreliable
narration, saying that ‘we should move toward thinking of unreliability and reliability as
existing along a continuum rather than as clear binary opposites’ (p. 218). Furthermore,
he makes a distinction between unreliable narration and deficient narration: ‘With defi-
cient narration, the actual audience stands at some distance from the implied author, the
authorial audience, and narrator, all of whom regard the narration as reliable’ (p. 211).
This distinction facilitates the reader to better understand the differences between fiction
and nonfiction.
When offering explanations for the existence of two types of actual audience who
have opposite attitudes toward the character narrator Humbert Humbert in Lolita, Phelan
concludes that it is nearly impossible to fully and definitively distinguish the term ‘autho-
rial audience’ from ‘actual audience’ (p. 115). However, he still thinks it necessary and
beneficial to both analyse these two terms separately and link them (p. 116). Here Phelan
seems to contradict himself: if the two terms are almost synonyms, how are we readers
supposed to analyse them separately? And does an author have more than one kind of
authorial audience in his or her mind when creating his or her work?
In sum, throughout the book Phelan shows in great detail what rhetorical poetics of
narrative looks like and how it can be used to interpret individual work and how indi-
vidual work in turn can revise and enrich the poetics. Somebody Telling Somebody Else
246 Language and Literature 27(3)

is a continuation of all of his previous books. Phelan firmly believes the validity and
viability of the implied author and extends the discussion of the term from fiction to
nonfiction; he continues to pay special attention to the affective, ethical and aesthetic
effects of author-audience interactions; he finds new tools to study the textual stubborn-
ness and brings to the fore the under-theorised character-character dialogue. Thus, peo-
ple whose primary interest is in the rhetorical theory of narrative will definitely find this
book illuminating and inspiring.

References
Chatman S (1978) Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.
Palmer A (2010) Social Minds in the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Zunshine L (2006) Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: The Ohio
State University Press.

Alison Gibbons and Andrea Macrae (eds.), Pronouns in Literature: Positions and Perspectives
in Language, Palgrave Macmillan: London, 2018, pp. xix + 279. ISBN: 978-1-349-95316-5,
US$99.99 (hbk), ISBN: 978-1349-95317-2, US$79.99 (ebk).

Reviewed by: Yanli Jia, School of Foreign Languages, Taishan University, China

As a fundamental part of the construction and negotiation of voices in literary works like
drama, poetry and narration, etc., pronouns influence the way readers perceive the posi-
tions and perspectives of other characters (or things) in relation to the narrator’s role and
location. In this sense, pronouns can affect readers’ emotional, empathetic or even ideo-
logical relations with and responses to the voices and characters in literature (p. 3).
However, little of literary critical and theoretical scholarship has specifically attended to
the role of pronouns in generating these interconnected effects. For readers interested in
the varied functions that pronouns intriguingly perform and how they engage readers
with characters or things in literary works, Pronouns in Literature: Positions and
Perspectives in Language is a long-awaited piece. This edited collection, composed of
13 contributions, distinguishes itself by bringing together an international and interdisci-
plinary group of scholars, including worldwide prominent experts, who offer state-of-
the-art insights into the complex roles, functions and effects of pronouns in literary texts.
Apart from their contributions in this volume, some of their previous influential views
will also be referred to with the aim of teasing out the developments and recent trends of
pronoun research in literary texts.
In Chapter 1, Alison Gibbons and Andrea Macrae discuss the complex functions
that pronouns perform, followed by a historical overview of the latest progress and
innovations in pronoun studies across a wide range of disciplines including linguistics,
stylistics, psychology, cognitive studies, narratology and literary criticism. The authors
also offer a brief summary of each contribution and highlight the themes running
through this collection.