Telling Readings

Of roughly the same vintage as he, though possessing entirely different theoretical impulses, I have been reading and learning from Jim Phelan's critical work for well over thirty years. In book after book, including the one currently under review, he has been successfully advancing what he might term “a comprehensive rhetorical poetics,” along with the admission, stated with characteristic candor here, that “this goal is not attainable in a single book” (63). Across his several books, however, beginning with Worlds from Words: A Theory of Language in Fiction (1981; U of Chicago P) and continuing through to Somebody Telling Somebody Else, he has evolved a remarkably capacious, yet coherent vision of the ways in which the inextricably linked acts of telling and listening, writing and reading, generate ethical agency. Books are not just texts, for Phelan, a collection of signs to decipher or ignore depending upon the ingenuity, will,...