Erzählung als rhetorische Handlung : klassische Antike und Poststrukturalismus

Kurzfassung/Abstract

In this paper I focus on rhetorical uses of narration, i.e. on the possibility of influen-cing opinions, beliefs, emotions, and possibly also actions of recipients through narra-tion. My main attempt is to collect and to compare different theoretical approaches on this subject, regarding not only rhetorical, but also philosophical and narratological theories, and including ancient (classical and postclassical) as well as today’s positions. Hopefully, this will prove to be of some help in counterbalancing a tendency which can be observed in many recent works about narratology, to neglect subject-specific ancient views even if they could still be instructive.
Furthermore, I will formulate a hypothesis to explain the phenomenon of persuasive narration. My point is that narration is to be contextualized in the theoretical back-ground of pragmatics, like some narratologists have claimed in the last years − chiefly referring to Grice’s ‚cooperative principle‛. More exactly, my suggestion consists in understanding narration as a speech act: in fact, since it can be used in order to achieve a variety of illocutionary points, narration fulfills Searle’s most important criterion in the definition of speech acts. Relying on this assumption, I will define the use of narra-tion as ‚rhetorical‛ when the speaker’s illocutionary point is to persuade somebody.